Last week I wrote about the importance being intentional when conducting classroom visits and that in order to be intentional, the observer needs to be clear about the main purposes for being in classrooms:

• To Create Connections

• To Advance your School Community’s Shared Vision

• To Collect Data

This week we’ll be diving into how to balance getting in classrooms for these reasons.

Creating Connections might be the most fun reason for doing classroom visits. I mentioned last week that quantity trumps quality with these, so you want them to be short. Get in, be fully present and supportive for about 5 minutes, get out. Period.

To be sure you do a ton of these, first start by setting a goal for how many to do each day or week and have a printed list of all your teachers. Start small and be realistic. My first year was insane. I had no assistant principal. A few students escalated daily into violent episodes requiring restraint, and I was the only one my teachers could call for help. I never knew what each hour would bring. For me, getting three of these classroom visits in a day was a win. In the years that followed after I was able to implement better behavior systems, hire a new school counselor who became a key leader in my MTSS team, and was given more support from the district, I was able to set my goal for these type of visits for 3 every hour. I would set my timer on my phone every hour and stop what I was doing to get into 3 classrooms. When I returned to my office, I would write the date beside the teacher’s name who I visited.

One of the best ideas I learned and implemented for doing visits to create connections was to send my teachers voice messages through their text messages. I would step out of their rooms, record a pleasant message–not a diatribe expounding on instructional practice–just an upbeat thank you or something nice I noticed. This way I didn’t have to worry about bringing anything with me into classrooms to leave a note, I didn’t have to interrupt, or try to navigate the room to get to their desk. I could just grab my phone and spend 15 minutes in three classrooms.

Advancing my Vision was the purpose that I made sure aligned with at least one round of visits a week. Basically, as I was doing visits to create connections I would look for some practice which exemplified one of our instructional initiatives. I had a pretty good idea where I could look and which teachers needed some kudos. Once I found an example of something each week, I was done with that purpose. I would take pictures, describe the awesome practice I saw, then share it with teachers.

One of the best tools I used for housing staff information and each week’s schedule, announcements, todos, etc. was Blogger. I would send out a few highlights each week in an email with the link to the blog. The latest blog post would feature a practice we were focusing on and include the pictures I took.

Collecting Data was the function of the more traditional walkthroughs I would do. First, I started with the goal of getting three walkthroughs in a week and then moved to 3 a day. I wanted to be sure I got into every teacher’s classroom at least once every 2 weeks for this type of classroom visit. I used the district walkthough instrument my first year, then asked to shorten and separate it into separate instruments for key areas of instructional practice. Like many out there, the tool (ewalk, then later Google Forms) automatically emailed the teacher. I kept the comments on the form positive or neutral (checks next to observed or not), but kept notes for evidence or things to coach on later.

One of the best resources I found for organizing how to plan and implement walkthroughs is Justin Baeder from the Principal Center. His template for classroom visit notecards helped me to be sure I saw every teacher within a two week time period and at different times of the day. The notecards are designed so that the principal will have one for each teacher. There is a table to fill in on one side with the teacher’s schedule, while the other side has sentence stems for instructional coaching. These were great because I could grab three cards a day, plan when I would go to the visit the teacher, date the visit on the card, and return the card to the bottom of the pile.

The bottom line is that to get into classrooms, you have to know your purpose, set a goal based on number of visits, make a plan, execute it and track it. It’s like many things in education. It’s simple, but not easy.

Last week, I shared strategies which made the overwhelming job of being a principal much more manageable for me. These were all part of the Personal Productivity System I developed from what I learned in David Allen’s Getting Things Done (commonly referred to as GTD).

The main parts of this productivity system are:

• A place and systems for processing “stuff”
• A place and systems for collecting, processing, and prioritizing thoughts.

Once I had those two main parts, I established a daily routine for sorting through those “collection buckets” as I referred to them last week. This routine is my Workday Startup Routine. Going through the steps in my startup routine help me focus on exactly what I need to do each day and ensure that I make time for the important, not just the urgent. They are how I plan my attack.

You have to think about stuff more than you realize, but not as much as you’re afraid you might.

David Allen

Workday Startup Routine

My Workday Startup Routine is a series of steps that I do every day as soon as I get to work before I do anything else. It helps to set a positive tone and establish exactly what needs to be accomplished each day. My routine ensures I prioritize the important, so I am not just always just pulled to the urgent. Also, if I do get pulled, when I come back I know exactly what to do next. A few highlights from my routine include:

Starting the day with 3 positive notes

When I was a principal, I wrote 3 different staff members a note each day and tracked who I wrote notes to by checking their names off a list. This ensured I encouraged those in my care and started my day focused on the positive.

Positive walk

I made myself do a lap around the school after I unloaded buses and talk to at least three different staff members a day to build relationships and connect. Until I made this part of my routine, it was way too tempting to stay in the office while it was fairly quiet in order to knock items off my list and I was missing a great opportunity to build relationships.

3 MITs

This is not on the list in the picture because at the time I was setting my MITs at the end of the day in preparation for the next day, but now I do this after I read email during the Workday Startup. Some folks will say that MITs are not tasks to check off–they are areas of focus to advance your mission and vision. I used the practice of identifying the MITs to prioritize 3 items from my list of Todos. I would go through my binder and think about what absolutely HAD to get done that day. It was and still is a key part of my productivity.

To learn more about the Workday Startup Routine check out: Focus on This Podcast Episode #028 – How to Start and Stop Your Workday and Daniel Bauer’s – Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast – Episode 230 How to Have Powerful 2020.

My best advice for creating your own startup and shutdown routines is:

• Get some background by listening to the above podcasts
• Create your routine based on what you need to do everyday, but sometimes forget/don’t do when things get crazy 
• Add activities that you do not do naturally, but are important
• Start your day with something positive

The benefits of building your own productivity system extend to managing stress, not just getting more things done. That’s probably was the most powerful benefit for me. In GTD, Allen discusses how building these systems “closes loops” in your brain. He contends that a lot of he stress comes from having “open loops,” but if you have a system you aren’t worrying about what you have to do.

During a question and answer time of a conference session I presented for new principals, one participant asked me what I would look for when starting walkthroughs. At the time, I talked about some of the different instruments I used and how I tried to narrow my focus depending on the initiatives we were working on, the time of the year, the purpose, etc. At the time, I hadn’t thought about what I now have come to see as a bedrock of instructional monitoring/coaching for a principal–congruency. No matter what kinds of different instruments or tools I had, I would always have one for monitoring congruency between purpose (target), standard, assessment, and activity/task.

Congruency is essential to raising student achievement. You could have the most dedicated teachers, the most engaging lessons, and the hardest working children, but unless these are all anchored in content that is congruent with what students really need to know and do, we won’t get the results we want. By anchored in content, I mean that the dedicated teachers are crystal clear on the intended meaning of the standards. They are using student-friendly learning targets for their lessons that communicate the intended learning and that match both the content and rigor of the standards. Engaging lessons have to provide students meaningful practice that is congruent to the practice required to meet the learning target. The hard-working children should then be required to show what they know in written form the demonstrates mastery of the target.

So, no matter what, I will always be focused on monitoring congruency. A congruent lesson can be thought of like a hamburger. While it’s fun to go into a classroom and give feedback on the meat (the engaging activities) dressing up that meat with cheese, bacon, lettuce and tomato (the partner talks, the questioning strategies, the stagecraft, etc) without a congruent top bun (the learning target based on the standard) and congruent bottom bun (the formative assessment that demonstrates mastery) you just have a salad–not a hamburger. When that activity is not even congruent with the standard you don’t even have a real beef burger. It’s just some mystery meat. Who wants mystery meat when you are craving a good burger?

When I first became a principal and there was so much that I didn’t know, there were days when I felt like I wasn’t helping anyone. The wins felt few and far between. When I started to get my feet under me and actually could answer a few of the many questions that were thrown at me, I began to feel a sense of satisfaction. As trust was built, teachers would come to me and/or shoot me a text and I could problem-solve with them to find a solutions to issues or challenges they were facing or simply “tell them what to do.” This sense that I was helping teachers was incredibly gratifying.

I didn’t realize that the way I problem-solved and helped teachers find solutions was actually creating a pattern that would not serve them well in the future. While the problem sitting in front of us would get solved, I was doing nothing to help build the teacher’s leadership or self management. In that sense, I wasn’t really helping the teacher, I was helping get one isolated problem solved. Instead of empowering the teachers and building their skills, I encouraged dependence upon me.

There began to be many times when I would wonder why the teachers would come to me with issues that I felt like they should be able to solve on their own. I would ask myself, “Can’t they figure this out on their own?” “Why can’t these teachers problem-solve?” I didn’t realize that I had set up their patterns of behavior myself.

If I could do it all over again, I would have used techniques to solve problems that would actually help the teachers become better problem solvers and think at higher levels, not just help the problem get solved. I am learning these techniques in Cognitive Coaching Training. This training is aimed at helping school leaders and coaches become mediators of thinking so that we can develop the capacity of teachers.

Research indicates that teaching is a complex intellectual activity and that teachers who think at higher levels produce students who are higher achieving, more cooperative, and better problem solvers. It is the invisible skills of teaching, the thinking processes that underlie instructional decisions, which produce superior instruction. Cognitive Coaching is a research-based model that capitalizes upon and enhances teachers’ cognitive processes.

The Thinking Collaborative, https://www.thinkingcollaborative.com/aboutcc

I just finished the first two days of this 8-day training and I’m completely sold on what they are teaching us. I am so excited and hopeful that I will learn tools that will not only help teachers with problem-solving of school/schedule/curriculum/parent situations, but with the instructional decisions they make each day. That’s where the power lies.