[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader.
[00:11] SPEAKER_01:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio with Barbara Blackburn, and that is a surprise for you, because when you've heard me before, you have heard me as the guest, and Justin Bader as the host. But today, we are turning the tables, because Justin, along with his co-author, Heather Bell Williams, has a new book out, and I asked him if I could do the interview instead.
[00:35] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:38] SPEAKER_01:
So, Justin and Heather, welcome to this special edition of Principal Center Radio.
[00:42] SPEAKER_02:
Well, thank you so much, Barbara. Thank you so much, Barbara. Welcome, Heather. It's awesome to be here.
[00:47] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, welcome to both of you. You know, I was so intrigued by this as soon as I got your book. The heart of your work is really the idea of making professional judgment concrete. What led you to that idea?
[01:00] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I'll jump in here with that answer or a start of the answer. I had been being coached by Justin as a member of the Principal Center for several years, and we spent a lot of time on the phone and on Zoom with me talking about a group of staff in my school, educational assistants, interestingly enough. We didn't start with teachers in mind, per se, and I was having trouble with this understanding of their evaluation tool was very simple. It was a one pager. with probably 20 bullets, and it says things like, staff responds appropriately to student misbehavior. And when I started to interact with the educational assistants in the evaluation process, it was really clear that we didn't agree on what that meant.
[01:46]
They thought they knew what that meant, and I thought I knew what that meant. And I was expressing frustration to Justin, and he said, it sounds like you're trying to operationalize common sense. And I said, that's exactly what I'm trying to do, but I don't know how to do it. And so many, many conversations later, this idea of using a framework, developing a framework of common language and common expectations emerged from that.
[02:09] SPEAKER_01:
I think that's so practical is that I felt like this had to be born out of a real need. And what you've just said is that's exactly what happened.
[02:18] SPEAKER_00:
Exactly. It was a frustration, to be honest, because I wasn't able to clearly get agreement and reach some sort of common understanding of what we all meant. when an educational assistant responded appropriately to a student misbehavior. And that was just an example of one of sort of those bullet points, but there was no description and no examples, that kind of thing.
[02:42] SPEAKER_02:
And really, professional judgment had to be at the heart of it. And when we talk about shared expectations or, you know, kind of getting people on the same page, training people, having a common framework for something, often we think procedurally. We think, what are the steps in doing this, or what are kind of the checklist characteristics of this? And those don't really get us to good judgment. They don't get us to the kind of ability to, you know, clone the people who seem to have it, the people who seem to get it. And I think, Heather, that's what we had really talked about is, like, how can I kind of clone the good judgment that I'm seeing among some staff and make that the norm, knowing that I can't actually clone people?
[03:20]
How can we do the next best thing and really kind of replicate the quality of their professional judgments?
[03:26] SPEAKER_01:
Well, and that's so correct. Yeah, I mean, to be able to do that, what you really want to do is systematize things. You know, you don't want just one person doing it right. You want the whole system. And so that's really what I hear you talking about.
[03:41] SPEAKER_00:
We started to say things like, well, I'd like everybody to be like Barbara, because she's doing a great job managing student misbehavior. I can't give those examples... to the group of educational assistants and say, everybody be like Barbara. But what I could do and what we realized we could do in a systematic sort of way was start to look at your practice that was fluent and were in, uh, Danielson terms.
[04:09]
She uses the term proficiency. We use fluency. But that idea of we could look at someone who's fluent in their practice and start to say, what kind of professional judgments are they making? What sort of decisions are they making in the moment that's impacting them and causing them to be fluent and really solid in their work?
[04:28] SPEAKER_01:
Well, To some degree, I think you've answered this as you've described how you came to this, but I was thinking about friends of mine who are leaders and, you know, recommending the book, and I knew the first question I was going to get from them was, with everything I have on my plate, why should I prioritize this? And I think you've sort of gotten at that a little bit, but what else would you add to what you've already said about why this needs to be a priority for a school or district leader?
[04:59] SPEAKER_02:
One of the things we've realized is that these should always be developed in response to a real need. As you said, you know, we don't want to make a handbook or a manual or a binder just for the sake of having a binder. Like, really, this process should only be undertaken because it is time consuming. It should only be undertaken when there is a specific need to help people get on the same page about professional practice and kind of align their professional judgment. And when we've seen examples from people that we've worked with at conferences or, you know, in our direct work with school districts, if they're starting with the purpose of creating a document, often it, the effort kind of falls flat, right? Like if our goal is to have something to put in a binder, we're not really going to come up with anything useful.
[05:43]
But if our goal is to help people improve their practice and improve their judgment, and especially to help specific people improve in a specific area, then that pays off very, very quickly.
[05:55] SPEAKER_00:
And once you start thinking, we've started to use the phrase framework thinking. Once you start thinking that way and starting to think, okay, I've got a problem of practice here. And how can I divide it into some key components? And how can I articulate a growth pathway? You start to do that automatically after you've had some practice with the tool. And then that's applicable in such a wide variety of contexts.
[06:20]
You know, in terms of teachers' work and educational assistants' work. I'm doing some coaching with new school administrators. They present a problem of practice. And in my head, I can use the framework thinking idea. to start to divide that practice into some key components and start to talk that way when I'm coaching someone. The thinking around frameworks doesn't always have to result in this idea of a document.
[06:44]
We found it to be very useful and transferable to other problems of practice.
[06:48] SPEAKER_01:
Oh, that's great. That absolutely is what, if I'm a principal, I need to hear because that tells me why it should matter to me. So, I really appreciate that clarification.
[06:59] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, so again, we started with a particular situation. I was working with a high school principal in, I think, kind of a lower-performing school where a lot of students were reading below grade level, and she was very vexed by the fact that her teachers were teaching below grade level. The texts that students were being asked to read in their ELA classes were well below grade level. These are, you know, high schoolers reading upper elementary to middle school novels in their English classes. And as she started to kind of unpack this problem, She identified a number of different issues that kind of needed to be addressed together, right? If we're going to raise the level of rigor, we can't just make things harder on students and go over their heads and, you know, see them be unsuccessful.
[07:42]
We have to do kind of a package of things together for this to work. So when it came to teaching on grade-level content, there were kind of a set of things that needed to happen together, and we called those the key components, and... As far as what the actual key components are, that's always a kind of a judgment call is to kind of bound your focus and say, okay, we're going to focus on this part. We're going to bite off this much and handle it well in a framework.
[08:07]
And what ultimately happened with that framework, and this is a good example of a tendency that we'll always run into, is it got a little bit too big. So if you look at the final rigor framework in the book, you'll notice that it's a little bit too big. It's bigger than we recommend. But it's part of a process of narrowing down what you want to focus on. So often we kind of explore some territory and then zoom in on one part of it a bit more.
[08:32] SPEAKER_01:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's really great.
[08:36]
That leads me to my next comment, which is, I think one of the strengths of the book is the examples, because there are multiple examples that I can't imagine that somebody couldn't go through and find at least one example that would help them get started. But your main focus in the book is teaching leaders and teachers how to build their own rubrics. And in Chapter 4, you start with just how do you choose a focus? So, what's the most important aspect of choosing a focus?
[09:07] SPEAKER_00:
Well, one of the key things, uh, Barbara, is that idea of the focus being, uh, something that would solve a problem of practice. And so we talk a lot about looking upstream. So if the problem is presenting downstream, looking upstream and trying to find... the root of the problem.
[09:26]
We walk readers through a root cause analysis in the book, that idea of looking through various lenses, asking why, multiple times. Why is something happening? Why is there this problem? Why are we not able to Yeah.
[09:59]
And so, like Justin said, we don't ever recommend sort of having a whole set of frameworks all prepared in a handbook. First of all, it's way too much work, but we want the framework to address a problem of practice that a leader is seeing in their school. I can give an example. As a principal, I'd been working with Justin and I was upping the number of walkthroughs and classroom observations that I was doing. And I noticed that there was real inconsistency in upper elementary math, for instance. And I noticed that there was inconsistency in their assessment results.
[10:34]
And in their ability to differentiate for various levels of students. So, we did a root cause analysis. We didn't know what was called that at the time, but we started to look at, all right, if we implement a guided math structure for grade three, four, and five math, we believe we'll see improvements. And so, that was where that particular framework came from.
[10:56] SPEAKER_01:
And, Justin, I don't want to cut you off, but I want her to expand real quickly, because in the next chapter, but it links so well to this, you talk about the importance of bounding your focus. So, I think you've alluded to that a little bit, that you can't try to do too much. So, how does picking your focus and bounding your focus, how do those two things work together?
[11:18] SPEAKER_00:
Sure, well, picking that focus, like guided math, that was that first step. But then we had to zoom in even more because I'm sure we all know lots about guided math and that there's a huge body of work around that that's already been published. So how is it that we need to Zoom in on just the right amount of detail. We talk in the book about grain size, you know, getting it right. I use the analogy of Goldilocks and the three chairs that she's looking at. You know, not too big, right?
[11:47]
That chair doesn't fit. Not too small, that chair doesn't fit. But it has to be just right. And Justine's example of rigor was a great example of we got the chair too big. It was way too big at the beginning. We had the right idea.
[12:00]
We were zooming in on rigor... But not enough. We had to get much more detailed and much more focused. And you can usually tell if it's too big when you're starting to come up with key components, which is a step we're going to talk about in a few minutes.
[12:15]
But that idea of if you have, like, eight or ten key components that are musts to get this practice right, then it's too big. You have multiple frameworks in that.
[12:27] SPEAKER_01:
Justin, anything to add about this notion of bounding? Because I do think that is real key.
[12:34] SPEAKER_02:
Absolutely. And we think about bounding the same way you might think about juggling, right? If somebody is juggling, there's a certain number of things, you know, whatever they're juggling that they have to keep in the air at once. And when you're thinking about key components and just kind of how broad we go with our framework and what scope of topics we address...
[12:56]
We want to think in terms of what a successful practitioner in that area is paying attention to as they implement that practice. And, you know, if we end up with a laundry list of, as Heather said, 10, 12, 15 things, some of those are not going to be as useful to the person who's implementing the practice. You know, we can really only pay attention to a couple of things at any one time. So to implement a practice, a given practice successfully, We have to decide what is a person who's exercising good judgment focusing on? What are the chainsaws or the toasters or whatever they're juggling, uh, that they're having to keep in the air and kind of manage as they enact this practice successfully? And...
[13:39]
That's in slight contrast to how we typically think of defining shared expectations, where often we want to add more and more to the list. We want people to think about more and more things so that they don't miss anything, so that they don't leave off any essential features. But that's not really how judgment works. When we're exercising judgment, we're focused on just a couple of key things. And this whole process is about figuring out what those key things are for ourselves so that we can explain it to someone who doesn't already get it. You know, someone on our staff who really needs help figuring out what to focus on.
[14:14] SPEAKER_00:
One of the things that comes to mind is that idea, as a busy principal, we often default to checklists or look fors, right? And that idea of a look for, well, if I go into this, you know, grade three classroom, we'll stick with the math example, and I see all these things... But the practice still isn't fluent. It's still at a beginning or basic stage.
[14:36]
And that frustration as a school leader of how do I really help someone move along a continuum of growth, um, even in an evaluation context, if you're using Danielson and enhancing professional practice, that idea of somebody's at basic. You want to know how to move them along. What are the key components? And that's the really necessary part. So that would be just what I would add into what Justin was saying about identifying those, those key things. They're not look fors.
[15:04]
They're not checklists. You often can't observe them in a classroom.
[15:08] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, and both of you really have led into this next piece because the process is very clear. It really works well. You know, I felt like I could take that and do your process because once you've talked about your focus and bounding your focus, now you're going to talk about the key components. And what I'm actually going to do to let you explain it fully is you come up with your key components and then you articulate the levels of fluency for each of those key components. Okay. And to me, that's really the heart, because if I'm going to explain to someone what they need to do, that's those, I can get my head around them kind of thing.
[15:42]
I can get my hand around that key characteristic and, okay, you're telling me what good looks like. So, talk about these characteristics and the fluency. I mean, how did you determine what's key? What are the challenges in doing this? You know, just what do you do with these two steps?
[16:03] SPEAKER_00:
One of the things around identifying those key components is asking yourself the questions, the really simple questions. What does the teacher need to keep in mind? What does the teacher need to juggle in order to make high-quality decisions while they're enacting the process? It's that idea of juggling and managing the process in real time in the classroom. One thing is, what does the unsuccessful teacher fail to pay attention to? And that's a helpful one, um, when you're identifying key components.
[16:34]
And what are the dimensions of the practice that all the successful teachers have in common? And that will start to help you narrow down key components. After you have that, you can start to move into articulating those levels of fluency.
[16:48] SPEAKER_02:
One of the concepts we use in the book is the idea of the bird's eye view that a leader has. You know, when you're getting into classrooms, you're seeing lots of different approaches, lots of different styles. Lots of different examples of practice, and that variation is a really rich source of ideas for your framework. So, as you see a contrast between what more and less successful people do in a particular area, you can start to take notes on that. So this is not a process that works best by going to a cabin in the woods where you can have some solitude. This really works best by going into classrooms and taking notes on what's going on.
[17:23]
And in the early drafts of a framework, often you don't have clear, abstract, you know, kind of ideas. You have specific examples with people's names on them. And, of course, this is a version that you have to not show to anybody. You don't want to say, you know, Justin did a terrible job, and he's at a level one, and Barbara did a great job, and she's at a level three. Like, we're...
[17:41]
We're not going to show this to anybody, but we are going to draw real examples from the practice in our school and get a sense of kind of what we're looking for and not just, you know, everybody be more like Barbara, everybody be more like Heather, but we try to do that abstracting ourselves and figure out what are they doing that's working? What does a successful practitioner keep in their mind when they're exercising sound professional judgment that the other people are missing, that we need to get on the same page about?
[18:12] SPEAKER_00:
Then as you start to articulate those levels of fluency, we always recommend starting with the third level, the fluent level. We delineate it into four, beginning, developing, fluent, and exemplary. We'll talk about exemplary in a minute, but we always suggest starting with fluent. That's what you want. That is the goal. If people are performing at the level at which you are expecting and that you want, that's level three, fluent.
[18:40]
And so, it's much easier as a leader to articulate level three. And I think it's just as easy to articulate level one, basic. Because that's not what we're looking for. That's probably part of the problem of practice that you've identified as the focus for the framework. So start with three, go to one, and then as you start to articulate level two, which is developing, that's where you start to get into those, hmm...
[19:06]
We use the term, it's a very unprofessional term, we use the term clunky in the book, that idea of they're almost at level three, but they're not there yet. They're starting to be aware of what the key components are. They're not able to juggle them all and integrate them. Uh, and then level four, I said, we'd address that briefly. Level four is really optional. And I don't know about everyone's leadership styles or listeners leadership styles, but I would be that driven sort of type A leader.
[19:39]
that expects everybody, I think I should be able to expect everybody to be performing at level four all the time or wanting to perform at level four. Why wouldn't you? But I've had to learn in this process to pull back and to recognize that level four is optional. Level four is probably outside your school. It's probably outside your district expertise. Uh, we define Level 4 as the best the profession has to offer.
[20:04]
So, that's pretty high calling. And that's optional. And that's a whole other sort of segment of work. But, really, our focus in developing frameworks would be looking at developing Levels 1, 2, and 3.
[20:17] SPEAKER_01:
You know, it's really interesting that you say that, because with my work, particularly with teachers, in terms of training them how to create or adapt a task so that the task is rigorous, I have four levels, very similar to yours, and what we find is the work is between two and three. It's how do you get from a two to a three? That's where the meat of school improvement is, and that's what I hear you saying. So, I think that's very true, and I think that probably would resonate with a lot of teachers who say, well, I thought I was doing it. You're telling me that I'm not quite there yet, and that's really what I think you're talking about there with the two, is you're not yet, and a three is where you want to be.
[21:01] SPEAKER_00:
One of the things that is a really great practical offshoot of this is the ability to provide targeted feedback for staff. And we go into that a little bit in the book, and we've been thinking about that and teaching about that since we wrote the book around what kind of feedback to give at various levels, and really how do you give feedback that enables a teacher to grow to the next level. And you nailed it, Barbara, when you said, like, level two to level three takes a long time, and it's the hardest work. Because it's, you've got some awareness, but you haven't been able to integrate it. Level one to level two, we should expect that to, those changes to take place rather quickly. And you're taking on a more directive role when you're telling someone the kinds of changes that need to be made.
[21:47]
So, exactly. The time is short between, or can be short between level one and two. But two and three takes a while.
[21:56] SPEAKER_01:
Well, we are close to running out of time, so I want to ask you two last questions. First, just if you wanted the listeners to take away the most important thing about this process, I would like each of you to tell me your most important thing. So, Justin, you want to go first?
[22:16] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I think if there's one thing that people can take away from this book, it's the ability to look at practice beneath the surface. And one of the examples that we have in the book is developing a framework for helping a new teacher or a less proficient teacher observe a peer. And I think we've all experienced peer observations that did not work because if we look at kind of the surface features of the practice, the things the teacher is saying or doing, or the materials they have in their classroom, you know, often people who are struggling take away the wrong lessons from observing a peer. Try to focus on copying the surface level features, we don't really get what we need, which is that deeper professional judgment and why it's working. So, for school leaders and coaches who are developing frameworks, that's our first step, is to look at that more proficient practice, but not at the surface features, but to look beneath the surface and see the professional judgments that undergird what we see.
[23:08]
And we call the temptation not to do that observability bias, this tendency to focus on whatever's easiest to document, easiest to observe, those kind of surface features. But really, this is a process of seeing beneath the surface and getting at that professional judgment that's at the heart of practice. So... As Heather said, even if you never actually develop and publish a whole framework, that framework thinking of figuring out, okay, what is really the heart of this practice that's making it work for this teacher that I could transfer and make clear to this other teacher, you know, that ability can really just be transformative.
[23:41] SPEAKER_01:
That is great. Heather, what about you? I don't know how you're going to build on that.
[23:45] SPEAKER_00:
I was just going to say, oh my gosh, he went first. Darn. Mine would be similar, but using the framework thinking in a wide variety of contexts. I love how just using the ideas of finding a focus, defining a problem of practice, getting a hypothesis around what you believe will solve that problem of practice, and then identifying key components and articulating that growth pathway I think for me, the secret sauce is in the feedback that you're able to give to teachers and staff that really enables them to move. I alluded earlier in our conversation to a frustration of their, you know, being a teacher who's at that level two developing level, and you just, you know, they need to move to level three, but for the life of both of you, you can't figure out what it would be
[24:35]
And you try all the checklists and you try all those other tools that we have, and that's connected to what Justin said, the above the surface of the water tools. But being able to create feedback and articulate targeted feedback to a teacher that really lets them grow and develop, I think, is a real win for school leaders.
[24:56] SPEAKER_01:
That's great. Now, what if I want to learn more? I mean, first, I can buy the book, uh, Mapping Professional Practice, so I can absolutely do that, but how can they get in touch with each of you for more information or to talk to you about working with their schools? Heather, why don't you go first? How can people get in touch with you?
[25:15] SPEAKER_00:
Sure. So, Justin and I work, uh, together with lots of folks. We also do separate consulting, and if, uh, you're interested in coaching or consulting, people can reach me at consulthbw at gmail.com, or can reach me through Justin's contact information, which he'll give you right now.
[25:33] SPEAKER_02:
Justin at principalcenter.com is good if you have questions about the book or want to get in touch with us. And, uh, yeah, book is available wherever books are sold online.
[25:41] SPEAKER_01:
That is great. And the book, again, is Mapping Professional Practice. And what it does best is show you what good looks like and teach you how to figure that out. So, go out, grab a copy, share it with your friends, contact them for more information. Everybody have a great day. Thank you, Justin.
[25:58]
Thank you, Heather.
[25:59] SPEAKER_02:
Thank you so much, Barbara. Thanks so much, Barbara.
[26:01] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
