Our all-inclusive membership for building capacity for instructional leadership

Evidence-Driven Instructional Leadership Professional Development for Your Entire Team

If you're a principal...

You already know that instructional leadership is the key to instructional improvement. 

But administrators—even if you have a great team of APs—can't be the only instructional leaders.

If you've ever opened your office door to get into classrooms, only to find a line of people waiting for you, you know the "bottleneck" problem we all face:

• You supervise too many teachers (3x as many "direct reports" as leaders in the corporate world supervise)
• Each department has its own specific standards, curriculum, and pedagogy
• You're inundated with too much data that doesn't directly inform key decisions
• Too many people need you for too much, all the time

...even though you're experienced, knowledgeable, and working long hours.

The Myth of the Data-Driven Super-Principal

We've been sold on an impossible dream—the dream of being the Data-Driven Super-Principal, who heroically gets everyone to improve.

Undaunted by the challenge of leading a learning community of hundreds—or even thousands—of students and educators, the Data-Driven Super-Principal personally does whatever it takes to lead improvement:

• Reviewing assessment results to make data-driven decisions
• Getting into classrooms to provide feedback to teachers
• Meeting individually and with teams to make decisions

It's rewarding work...until you realize it's unsustainable—and worse, it's not enough, because schools need more leadership than administrators alone can provide.

Department Heads & Team Leaders: The Missing Layer of Leadership

As an administrator, you need a more direct connection to the realities of the teaching and learning—not by personally spending all of your time in classrooms, but by cultivating and working closely with department heads and team leaders.

Too often, these crucial leaders are reduced to little more than team note-takers, who have extra paperwork to complete and extra meetings to attend, but no real authority. 

And when team leaders don't have the authority they need to make decisions, those decisions get "delegated up" to you—creating both a bottleneck and a shortage of crucial information.

In other sectors, such as corporate, military, and nonprofit organizations, leaders typically supervise no more than 7-9 direct reports. In education—alone among professional fields—typical ratios are one administrator for every 20-40 teachers. 

We don't necessarily need more administrators in every school, but we do need more leaders—specifically, teacher leaders who are close to the work of teaching and learning. 

As a Navigator school, you'll gain crucial capacity-building professional development resources for your entire leadership team. When you activate team leaders and department heads, you'll empower them to lead in curriculum, instruction, and assessment—not to insulate you from key decisions, but to communicate and coordinate, so everyone is on the same page. 

Evidence-Driven, Not Data-Driven

For decades, we've been told that data is the key to making sound decisions. But is it?

Sure, data can be incredibly useful—but by itself, data doesn't tell us what to do. It needs to be transformed into evidence. 

We can have all the data in the world, but there's a reason YOU, as the school leader—and not someone in a far-removed office—are responsible for making decisions for your school: data doesn't exist in a vacuum. Context matters, and you know what's going on in your school context better than anyone. 

The problem is that evidence gets overwhelming quickly. 

Data can be tabulated and averaged in a spreadsheet, but by its very nature, evidence is richer and more complex.

This richness and complexity are why evidence is so useful for making decisions—and why we must build additional capacity for instructional leadership. 

When we activate team leaders and department heads as instructional leaders, we gain the leadership bandwidth we need for communicating, coordinating, and making decisions. 

An Evidence-Driven Approach to Instructional Leadership

In Navigator, The Principal Center's flagship program for building capacity for instructional leadership, you'll embark on a six-week journey to develop Team Instructional Frameworks (TIFs), in collaboration with key leaders in each grade level or department in your school.

You'll also begin the year-long shift to evidence-driven instructional leadership, by implementing the High-Performance Instructional Leadership model popularized in Dr. Justin Baeder's book Now We're Talking! 21 Days to High-Performance Instructional Leadership.

Key leaders responsible for overseeing teacher development, including administrators and instructional coaches, will transform their ability to change teacher practice through our flagship High-Performance Instructional Leadership Certification Program. 

Finally, you'll embark on a multi-year path to sustainable improvement using our evidence-driven school improvement system in the Organizational Learning Intensive. 

As a Navigator school, you'll have immediate access to all of our professional learning programs for school teams, plus our Repertoire feedback app. 

Frequently Asked Questions