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What Are We Learning?. District Insight on Supporting Principal Effectiveness. The Wallace Foundation Principal Pipeline Initiative.
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What Are We Learning? District Insight on Supporting Principal Effectiveness
The Wallace Foundation Principal Pipeline Initiative In 2011, The Wallace Foundation launched a $75-million five-year initiative to help six urban school districts develop a much larger corps of effective school principals and to determine whether this improves student achievement across the district, especially in highest needs schools . The six districts are Charlotte-Mecklenburg; Denver; Gwinnett County; Hillsborough County; New York City; and Prince George's County. The Initiative focuses on four key parts of the pipeline:1.Defining the job of the principal and assistant principal. 2.High-quality training for aspiring school leaders. 3.Selective hiring.4.Leader evaluation and on-the-job support.
Problem Statement Almost every state and district in the country is attempting to develop effective systems that evaluate teachers and school leaders in order to improve instructional and leadership practice and increase student learning. Developing effective evaluation systems are, in fact, a high priority of both the field and the federal government. The key role of the principal in teacher evaluation is one of the most important lessons from the first generation of Wallace work. However, today’s principals are struggling to find the tools, time, resources, and capacity to effectively teachers and be strong instructional leaders. If districts hope to develop effective evaluation systems, then what kind of tools, processes, organizational structures and practices are available that can help principals effectively evaluate teachers and be strong instructional leaders?
Project • The first step of this project was to better understand the contexts, promising practices and challenges related to the role of the leader in teacher evaluation. • The main data source were pipeline district leaders who completed a 47-question survey and participated in post-survey interviews during January and February of 2012. • Participants included Directors, Chief Technology and Information Officers, and their staffs.
Project Additional data included: • CCSSO sent a 6-question survey to 24 states in the State Consortium on Educator Effectiveness during January and February of 2012 and received 13 responses. • National SAM Innovation Project (NSIP) distributed a 17-question survey at the 5th Annual SAM’s Conference in January 27-30, 2012 to 249 principals and received 105 responses. • Interviews were conducted with Jackie Wilson, Delaware Academy For School Leadership and Carol Seid, Representative on the NAESP and NASSP Committee on Principal Evaluation.
Strong Voices “Think about what’s going to have the most impact on teaching and learning… What is really going to get to the heart of what that teacher is doing every day in the classroom with students.” (School District Administrator) “…the strengths include a grassroots effort involving teachers, principals, superintendents, parents, and education partners coming together to establish guiding principles, common language and understanding, as well as collective agreement on the purpose and intent of the effectiveness system.” (State Agency Administrator) “Throughout, what we have done is reversed the way we’ve always done business.” (School District Administrator) “You can’t fire your way to excellence, you have to develop it and our evaluation system lends itself to doing that.” (School District Administrator)
The System Matters! Instructional Leadership Promising Practices, Challenges, and Ways To Overcome Those Challenges Exist At Every Level OF The System PLC Hierarchy of Evaluation Needs* Time Leadership Skills * With Apologies And Thanks To Abraham Maslow Organizational Support Stakeholder Collaboration Compelling Vision Of Evaluation
The System Matters Theme #1: Develop A Compelling Vision Of What Good Evaluation Is And Why It Is Important • A common understanding of the purpose of the new evaluation system • Clear focus on teacher and leader effectiveness and student growth • Strong integration between teacher evaluation and teacher and leader professional development • Use of multiple measures, including increased formative assessments • Utilize tools that increase the time that principals spend assessing instruction and developing teachers • Adapt state evaluation instruments to the context of each district • Collect student artifacts and student data as part of the evaluation • Work with teachers to identify practices and behaviors in the classroom that make a difference
The System Matters Theme #2: Establish Clear Communication And Strong Collaboration Among All Stakeholders • Include everyone (teachers, principals, community) in the design of the evaluation system • Take time to pilot, obtain feedback, and engage in continual improvement • Keep feedback loops open between principals, teachers, district, and other stakeholders • Increase state and district collaboration so that districts have the local flexibility to recognize context and encourage innovation • Work with universities to develop instructional leadership skills in the pipeline for aspiring principals
The System Matters Theme #3: Ensure Organizational Structures of Schools & Districts Support Principals • Realign central office to support principals and protect principal time • Increase the effectiveness of principal coaches and supervisors • Streamline and make the evaluation process as efficient as possible • Move some administrative duties to the central office • Push school-based budgets to principals to give them more flexibility to focus the resources on their priorities • Identify ideal ratio of principal/assistant principal to teacher to conduct evaluations
The System Matters Theme #4: Develop and Implement Effective Ways To Strengthen Leadership Skills • Increase the effectiveness of principal coaches and supervisors • Implement effective professional development for principals including strong learning communities and networks • Provide on-going support rather than one-time training • Develop common language of effective practices (shared framework and rubrics) • Focus on calibration of observations so that there is strong inter-rater reliability across principals • Ensure that principal coaches work with the principal in every stage of the evaluation, including providing teacher feedback • For large school districts, train principals in small groups or networks • Start small by focusing training on just a few indicators within the framework used to evaluate teachers
The System Matters Theme #5: Help Principals Manage Their Time Effectively • Using the SAM process to successfully provide time and conditions for teacher to improve teacher practice • Use tools and technology to make the evaluation process more efficient (e.g. Lawson, iPads, Truenorthlogic, Dashboards) Theme #6: Instructional Leadership
Leading Change In Evaluation: Need-By-Need Using this Framework of Evaluation Needs helps us begin to understand more about how states, districts and principals view the promising practices, challenges and ways to overcome those challenges at every level of the system. Clearly, there is much more we need to know about the promising practices and challenges throughout the system.
Conclusions • We need to know more about the promising practices, challenges, and ways to overcome those challenges at every level of the system. • We need to find strategies, tactics and tools to help strengthen the communication among states, districts, principal, teachers and others involved in evaluation. • The perspectives of principals is crucial and we need to find ways to increase their participation in these conversations.
Implications for Your Work Small Group Discussions: • Each group will spend 15 minutes reacting to what we just heard using the following guiding questions: • To what extent do you agree with the promising practices? Are there any you would add? • To what extent do you agree with the challenges? Any to add? • Do you have additional suggestions for ways to overcome the challenges?
