What Makes for GREAT INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERS?

Standing with two of my former principals - Both GREAT INSTRUCTIONAL LEADERS!

In Thomas Friedman's Landmark work - The World is Flat, he recounts the owner of a manufacturing plant in Beijing, China, placing an African proverb translated into Mandarin on the factory floor.  All the workers would see it as they came to work each day.  It read:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.” 

 While I am not sure I am in agreement with what could be viewed as a tacit threat posed by the owners of the Chinese plant, I do agree that good leadership requires a vision of our purpose and the motivation to inspire us to get there.  It is for that reason I was encouraged when I entered the faculty lounge of a school where I was to teach and saw emblazoned over the doorway which every teacher had to pass, the saying:  

 

 "Teach Like A Champion Today!"

 

As a teacher I find it difficult to walk under a sign like that and not be affected.  I suppose that some teachers might resent the saying as if to suggest that they are not already teaching like champions and they have to be encouraged; but I always welcomed it - much like the sports team that has the tradition of slapping the header of the doorway when leaving the locker room to do battle on the playing field each time.  It takes mental strength and a will to face your students each day, and you have to be doing the kinds of things in your classroom that makes you believe you are making a difference and that your time with them is important.

 

Having supported myself through college by doing custodial work in the student union building, I have always felt a kindred spirit with the custodians that take care of my room.  Our work is much the same as theirs - as they care for our room, we care for our students.  I have more than once commiserated with the custodian taking care of the room as we did our work in parallel, "it doesn't matter how good either one of us do our jobs today, they still come back tomorrow and we have to do it all over again."

 

The atmosphere at a school is critically important.  I am one of these crazy people who goes to Disney just to look at the set designs.  How are they doing that effect?  What faux finish are they using here?  I guess it has translated into my classroom.  To me, a classroom needs to speak to students the subject that is taught there, and how enjoyable the time that is spent there is going to be.  I have always been impressed with teachers and administrators that go to great lengths to provide nice instructional spaces.  It has always been a sense of great sadness to go into a dreary classroom where it is difficult to even tell what subject is taught in the room.  If I as a teacher feel that way, I can imagine how uninspired students will be.

 

 At this school that I previously mentioned, there were many western themed items used to decorate the entire school. The cafeteria looked the part of a western Cantina, it was amazing. It did so much to enhance the atmosphere of the school that I had to ask the principal how they had pulled it off.  He said that one night he and his wife were dining at Durangos and they noticed that it looked like they were in the process of redecorating the establishment.  Old things were coming down and new things were going up.  A few inquiries as to what they were going to do with the old stuff, and, "I happen to be the principal of a middle school and it would be perfect for our school motif", and not long after that, he was talking to the vice president of the company and all this western stuff was being sent to the school.

 

Head Master - The Instructional Leader

I think the Harry Potter series really stood out as a reminder to us all the things that students AND teachers crave about a school.  Besides magic that is... having a true Head Master in the school, an Instructional Leader that is a master teacher them self and has the ability to inspire their teachers and students to do great things.

 "Where there is no vision, the people perish." 

Proverbs 29:18

I have been privileged to work for many good instructional leaders.  They do a difficult job. I have always said that I could never be a school principal because it is bad enough that students and parents hate me, it would just be too much to have my colleagues hate me as well.  So I understand some of the challenges.  I also have watched and learned from them to discover what makes them great.  Here are four of my observations:

1)  They staff toward their own weaknesses

And then don't spend all their time resenting or being intimidated by the abilities that they don't have.  Which leads me to my next quality...

 2)  They welcome and celebrate the successes in others 

Being presented the Motorola STEM Grant check by School Board member Michael Krupp.  He took time out of his day to do this and ended up doing it again a week later when I was awarded another grant.  He then spent some time in the classroom with the students, seeing what they were learning and visiting with them.  He is what is known as an Instructional Leader, and I was privileged to work with him when he was a principal.  

No one from the school except a teacher colleague came to join the presentation (she was the one who took this picture), or did anything else to recognize the effort.  The project went on to be the feature article in the Feb 2014 edition of Tech Directions:

So COOL! These are my students on the cover of a magazine!

To me the most humbling example of celebrating the success in others is when, as a leader, you have to give up the staff member to another position because you know it will allow them to grow even more.  I witnessed this in a former placement as the principal recognized his talented staff members that he had worked with and trained going on to further leadership opportunities with other schools.

He recognized and thanked them publicly in staff meetings and wished them well.  As it turns out, he was actually training much of the leadership in that area of the district.  When I asked him how he could do that with such cheerfulness he told me:  "Steve, I made the decision early on that I would always support the growth opportunities of my staff even though it was difficult to see them go."  

Good Instructional Leaders do this.  How can an instructional leader celebrate and hope to promote student growth without at the same time celebrating and promoting the growth of their staff?

"How can an instructional leader celebrate and hope to promote student growth without at the same time celebrating and promoting the growth of their staff?"

But more powerful to me was the example of an instructional leader who received no recognition, no celebration, not even a word during faculty meeting after doing an amazing job as assistant principal and leaving the school to start their placement as a principal.

It was as if there was to be no mention of his name, like he never existed, yet all the monuments of his success at our school served as witnesses to his accomplishments...it was such a profound lack of appreciation that I felt to draw a cartoon and send it to him: 

3)  They know how to recognize, attract, and retain talent

Great leaders attract great talent because of all the reasons a fore mentioned.  They provide an atmosphere of growth and encouragement and as a result, the teachers can do great things with their students.

"The best way to provide a great atmosphere to support students, is to provide a great atmosphere that supports teachers."

 

4)  They do great things on their own, because it is the right thing to do, not because someone had to tell them they should do it.

I know this is wordy, the English teacher that I bounce my prose off of would be telling me right now:  "Steve, aren't you just saying to be proactive?"  To which I would say, "yes", but so much more.  Great leaders have the uncanny ability of anticipating situations and putting policy and procedures in place to head off difficulties.  Yes, that is pro-activity.  But that is also just a backwards CYA mentality.

Much better than that, great leaders see where educational practice should go and they go there, irrespective of what the educational norms are.  As a result, they don't play catch up, they play cutting edge.

"....great leaders see where educational practice should go and they go there, irrespective of what the educational norms are.  As a result, they don't play catch up, they play cutting edge."

I think a lot about this.  I had the opportunity to meet with several district leaders following my return to the district.  I was trying desperately to give them a sense of vision that I had obtained working national education policies in Washington DC, what others were doing, where the technologies and national priorities were going and what we could be doing in our district.  Unfortunately they were so caught up in the "thick of thin things," that they could not see the vision of what we could be.

In conversing with an educational leader recently, he asked me what we can do to get these administrators to catch the vision and to see things differently.  My immediate response was, make them see beyond their districts.  Make them have to visit high performing districts and see what other people are doing. 

I met with a superintendent in a very high performing district in Virginia.  She had teachers and students in her district doing historical research learning about pioneering electrical innovation by recreating them using primary source documents.  These middle school students then re engineered the research using 3D printing technologies.  It was amazing! and it landed these students and their teacher presenting to the Thomas Jefferson Library and the Smithsonian Institution.  Now the Smithsonian is picking up on their work and is poised to launch a line of instructional electrical kits that follow the research.

So coming from a district steeped in an assessment mentality, I had to ask her.  How do you do this?  How can you free up the time in the instructional day to justify this for teachers and students when everyone is clamoring about accountability and testing everything?  She replied without even thinking... "Leadership.  We decided that we were not going to chase all those accountability rabbits, and the school board is backing us up on it.  There are other ways to measure student progress."  

I would say so, and working with the Smithsonian Institution is probably a good indicator toward "adequate yearly progress," wouldn't you think?  What kind of resume do these students have as they move into high school and on to college?

The interesting thing about this was I asked her this question when this project was just an idea....  BEFORE it made it to Washington DC or MAKE Magazine.  She told me these things when it was just one teacher's crazy idea about how to teach students.  She was sticking her neck out, not hedging her bets, and not playing catch up to other districts... she was LEADING.

You can see the project here in the June issue of Make Magazine and there are several very good videos describing the project:

http://makezine.com/2015/06/29/re-inventing-first-text-message-system/