[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 Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] Justin Baeder:
I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and in this special episode, I'm going to be sharing some strategies for getting into classrooms, doing classroom walkthroughs this year.
[00:24] Announcer:
And now our feature presentation.
[00:27] Justin Baeder:
And specifically, we're going to focus on accountability, what you should hold yourself accountable for. And if you are a principal supervisor, what you should hold the principals you lead accountable for. Because one of the biggest mistakes I see in principals striving to get into classrooms is over committing to work to be done in the classroom. We give ourselves so huge a task. We give ourselves so much homework in our classroom walkthroughs that we don't actually get to them. And think of it this way, the bigger a challenge you give yourself, the bigger a task you bite off every time you get into classrooms, the more you are going to dread getting into classrooms and the harder it's going to be to actually successfully finish a classroom walkthrough.
[01:12]
So my recommendation is that you give yourself as little to do as possible when you get into classrooms to create the smallest possible barrier to getting into classrooms and hold yourself accountable for something very simple, and that is frequency. frequency of classroom visits should be our main focus for accountability, both for ourselves, and again, if you're a principal supervisor, that should be the main thing that you hold your principals accountable for, getting into classrooms frequently. And the target that I recommend is three visits a day. Three classroom visits a day, every day, will get you into classrooms more than 500 times a year in a 180-day school year, and it'll even give you a little bit of wiggle room for days that you are absent out of the building entirely or just unable to get into classrooms if you can consistently get into classrooms three times a day every day with very few exceptions you are going to be in incredible shape so to do that how can you set yourself up for success how can you make this doable easy fun enjoyable and not something that you are going to dread
[02:17]
So for your first cycle, we want to keep this so simple and so easy that you cannot fail. We're going to remove every extra step, every possible hindrance from getting into classrooms and just go get into every classroom for every teacher that you supervise back to back. for one to two minutes each in one day. And if you get interrupted, that's okay. Just get right back to it. But in your first cycle, visit every teacher for one to two minutes in one day.
[02:42]
We call that cycle one. And in cycle one, you don't need to take any notes. You don't need to fill out any paperwork. You don't need to really do any planning. Just go and get into every single classroom. The only real thing you need to do is keep track of which teachers you've been to because it's easy to miss people.
[02:58]
And sometimes a teacher will be on their prep, they'll be out of the room when you stop by. Just keep track and make sure that you get to everyone. And we have a printable called the Classroom Walkthrough Tracker. You could also do this with just a staff roster. Just use that as a checklist to make sure that you get to everyone. Now in this first cycle of visits, if you're not writing anything down other than which teachers you've been to, what are you actually doing?
[03:21]
I recommend that in your first cycle, you focus on two priorities, being present and pleasant. Simply go into each classroom, smile and wave, get people used to seeing you there and make sure that it's a positive experience for you and for teachers and students so this is not a time to ask difficult questions this is not a time to grill people or put them on the spot this is just a time to show up and get yourself used to the idea and get other people used to the idea of you being in classrooms frequently and sometimes people will react in surprising ways they might have their students stand up and greet you as one teacher had her students do the first time i showed up you might have People come and pull you aside and explain to you what they're doing. But we want to get to the point where people just kind of ignore you when you walk into the room so that you can be a fly on the wall and see the lesson as it would be if you weren't there.
[04:12]
That's our goal. We want the lesson to be as normal as possible. We don't want a special dog and pony show. We don't want to song and dance every time we walk into the room. We want to see instruction as it's normally practiced. So breaking the ice in this, in this first cycle, gets us toward that goal.
[04:28]
And again, this first cycle can be done in one day. If your first day of school is coming up, you can do it on the first day of school. If school has already started and you didn't do this, you can do it anytime. And it's actually a good idea to repeat cycle one anytime you have a break. So if you have a substantial break from school, several days off, or if you have been out for...
[04:48]
professional development or if you've been sick or anything like that, it's a great idea to repeat cycle one your first day back just to see everybody, to break the ice, to get back into the habit. But that is cycle one in our three cycle startup plan. Cycle two is similar. in that we don't need to do any kind of note taking. All we need to do is record our visits to make sure that we don't miss anybody. But in your second cycle, you're going to visit three teachers a day for about two weeks until you get around to everyone.
[05:16]
And it may not be exactly two weeks. It may not take exactly two weeks to get to every teacher that you supervise. But for most people, that's in the ballpark. If you get around to three teachers a day, you should be on about a three week rotation. And in your second cycle, you want to stay for five to 10 minutes per visit now doing three of these in a day is not too difficult you don't have any paperwork to do you don't have any documentation other than the date and time so this is pretty easy you don't have to take any notes or send anything to the teacher and if you can chat a little bit great if you can start to try to find a time to chat with the teacher and just say something nice But this is not a time to give any kind of critical feedback, pros and cons, warm and cool feedback, anything like that. We're not trying to give advice here.
[05:59]
We're just trying to get in the habit of being present and pleasant. And in our second cycle, paying a little bit closer attention. Again, we don't want to take a device. We don't want to take any documents. We don't want to take any notes. We're just showing up and paying attention.
[06:14]
That is cycle two. And again, that should take about two weeks. And as soon as you are done with cycle two, you can go right into cycle three. And in each of these cycles, we're going to keep the same order of visits to teachers. Now, it doesn't matter that much for cycle one because it's all in one day. But starting in cycles two and three, people will start to notice if your visits to different classrooms are spaced out oddly, right?
[06:35]
Like if you visit one teacher two days in a row, they're going to notice, oh, Justin visited me two days in a row. Something must be up. But if they compare notes with their colleagues and they say, hey, has Justin been in your room two or three times so far? And then their colleagues all say, yeah, hasn't been a big deal. Then it's not going to be a big deal. But we want to avoid making anybody feel singled out or targeted and keeping a consistent rotation, keeping the same order of visits to each teacher and is going to become very critical in cycles two and three.
[07:01]
And I recommend that you just keep the same order that you started with in cycle one. Again, that's not critical. If you have some changes that you want to make, perhaps it would make more sense to visit people by team or grade level or department. Or if you have a very large campus, space out your visits geographically. So you might say, I'm going to visit that building today and visit all three teachers in that building that I supervise. whatever makes the most sense for your situation, but keep a consistent rotation.
[07:27]
And starting in cycle three, you are going to want to take some sort of note-taking device with you. Now, that could be pen and paper. If you are more comfortable using pen and paper, or if you think your teachers will be more comfortable, that's fine. Take some low-inference notes on paper. Or if you are using a device with an app like our Repertoire app, just take low inference notes. And I like to do timestamps.
[07:48]
I like to do just a description of what I'm seeing and hearing and quotes and as literal and low inference a set of descriptions as possible. My one caveat for notes is that if you are taking notes I recommend that you send them to the teacher. And that's a little bit more work if you're taking notes by hand. But teachers are very fearful of having secret evidence compiled about them. Teachers are worried that you're putting together a secret dossier or portfolio of evidence that you are going to use against them. And one way that you can...
[08:20]
deal with those fears and kind of eliminate that worry and that anxiety on the part of teachers is to simply share your notes with the teacher. You can say something like, hey, it was nice to stop by today. Here are my notes. Let me know if you want to chat. And then you can just have your notes pasted into an email. Or if you are taking handwritten notes, good luck to your staff in reading your handwriting if it's anything like mine, but just make a copy, just make a photocopy, put it in their box and say, nice to see you today.
[08:44]
Let me know if you want to talk. And in your second and third cycle, you do want to try to find a time to chat with the teacher. This is not a big deal. It's not, please come see me after school, something that's going to be intimidating, but you want to casually find a time to chat just to get on the same page and to give the teacher a chance to fill in any context that you might've missed. Like if students were working silently at their desks when you came by, the teacher might want to tell you what they were working on and why they were working on that today. And if you didn't get a chance to talk while you were in the classroom, it can be very helpful to get that context by stopping by and talking later.
[09:19]
Now to figure out the best time to do that, you may find it helpful to have each teacher's schedule in front of you. And if you have a student information system or a document with your master schedule that you can print that has everybody's exact schedule in it already, great, just print that out. We also have a set of classroom walkthrough note cards. We have an index card template that we can provide in the classroom walkthrough toolbox, and we also physically send out the note cards along with a copy of my book to people who sign up for the Instructional Leadership Challenge. The nice thing about having physical note cards is they're a physical reminder, and you can just take the three note cards for the teachers you're visiting that day with you as you get into classrooms, and then you can record, you know, which subject did I see? What was the date?
[10:01]
Did I get a chance to talk with the teacher? You can make a little mark if you had a chance to talk with the teacher. And then those three note cards are your physical reminder to go and see those three teachers that day. And if one of them is absent or for whatever reason you don't get to that teacher, just put that teacher's note card back on top of the stack and put the note cards for the teachers that you did get to on the bottom of the stack. And that stack of note cards can serve as your reminder. And those note cards, again, are included as a printable template in the classroom walkthrough toolbox.
[10:29]
And we physically send them to you if you sign up for the Instructional Leadership Challenge. And we'll also send you a hard copy of my book Now we're talking 21 days to high performance instructional leadership, which these strategies and the challenge are based on. Now in your third cycle, you are ramping up to the full model that we talk about in chapter two of the book. Your classroom visits are going to be in the 10 to 15 minute range. In this third cycle, you want to keep on the same order, the same sequence of visits to each teacher. So the frequency is about the same for each teacher.
[11:02]
If they're comparing notes saying, hey, Justin is coming to my room twice this month, is that your experience as well? People are gonna say yes, it's about once every two weeks, then nobody is going to worry or panic. You want to keep that rotation. And in chapter two, we talk about seven characteristics, and we call these the seven keys to sustainable impact. Ultimately, you want your classroom walkthroughs to be frequent, every teacher, every two weeks or so, and that's going to get you around to everyone about 18 times a year. So frequent.
[11:28]
You want them to be brief, five, 10, 15 minutes at most, but you still want them to be substantive. And of course, in your first cycle, they're not going to be substantive yet. We're working up to that. across three cycles. We want it to be more than making an appearance, but we want to start in cycle one by making an appearance, being present and pleasant. Fourth, we want those visits to be open-ended.
[11:47]
So we're not here to fill out a form. We're not here to give a rating. We're here to really pay attention to instruction and get a sense of what's going on. And we want to, number five, take evidence-based notes. So low inference, descriptive notes, so that when we talk about practice, we're talking about what teachers are actually doing, and we're able to refer to specific things that happened in the lesson. Number six, we want them to be criterion referenced.
[12:10]
So we're using our teacher evaluation criteria as our vocabulary for talking about practice. By the way, if you are using repertoire, one thing you'll find under snippets now is that we have system snippets where you can turn on with one click your entire teacher evaluation rubric. Whatever you use, we probably have it in there. And if you use something custom, you can send it to us and we can set that up so that when you're taking notes, type in a keyword say around engagement or assessment or attention or whatever words you are typing to describe what's going on that will actually keyword search your criteria and then you can either insert those criteria into your notes or you can just pin them on the screen to have as a reference to help you kind of triangulate between the evidence and the expectations so do check that out if you are a repertoire user we include a 14-day trial of repertoire with the instructional leadership challenge The Instructional Leadership Challenge is yours to keep even if you don't stick with the Repertoire app, that is totally up to you.
[13:04]
But if you are using Repertoire, it is very easy to keep those criteria in mind. And then number seven in our seven keys to sustainable impact from chapter two of Now We're Talking, we want our classroom walkthrough process to be conversation oriented. Ultimately, the conversation is the goal. This is the fun part, this is where the value comes from, this is where the impact comes from, talking with teachers about their practice, using that rich language of your instructional framework, your teacher evaluation criteria, and using the specific evidence that you gather in your visits. That is what is going to allow you to figure out where each person is in their practice and what each person needs to grow to the next level, and to figure out where your school is collectively and ultimately to inform all of the decisions that you make as a leader. If I could pick one thing that I could help every school leader everywhere do, it would be this.
[13:57]
It would be to get into classrooms every single day. And again, I recommend accountability-wise that you focus your efforts on frequency. Don't focus on suggestions don't focus on taking the most beautiful notes don't focus on leaving the most beautiful cards for teachers telling them what a great visit it was and how much you appreciate them those are great things to do but focus first on frequency because only when you have frequency in place Does the rest of this matter? Too many school leaders do what I call hypothetical walkthroughs. They have this beautiful model in their heads, they have this beautiful feedback that they imagine themselves giving, but because they are not getting around to classrooms consistently, it's all theoretical, it's all hypothetical, and it doesn't actually happen. Nothing happens until you get into classrooms.
[14:45]
And then from there, once you've established that foundation of frequency, you can start to add on the richness, the quality, the depth. If you want to take really good notes and provide really good feedback and just have very deep conversations, you can do that if you are getting into classrooms. But that is the foundation. Frequency first. You can learn much more about how to get into classrooms every single day consistently, and you can get all of the tools that I've been talking about and quite a bit more in the way of tools in the Instructional Leadership Challenge at principalcenter.com slash challenge.
[15:15]
And that does include a copy of my book that is yours to keep. And I have a coupon code for you. If you use the code walkthrough, All one word, all lowercase. W-A-L-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H. Walkthrough is the coupon code to use at principalcenter.com slash challenge to save $80.
[15:32]
That brings the price down to just $19, which is actually lower than the cost of the book. We have plenty of people who love the software and stick around to more than justify giving you the book for less than it costs us. So we're not... upset at all if you take the challenge and then do not continue if you say just please cancel we will never charge you again i'll just say the word and no hard feelings whatsoever i would love to get this book into your hands for just that 19 the challenge is yours to keep the note cards are yours to keep the book is yours to keep principalcenter.com slash challenge
[16:03]
We also have some tools for teams. So if you see these printable tools here and you think, I want to make this available to my team, any of our principles, you're welcome to share it with your team. And we even have some decision making tools to use with your team, like the classroom walkthrough interruption matrix. There are probably specific things that happen in your school over and over that make it difficult to get into classrooms. Things that occur that take up your time, that interrupt you, that make it difficult to get into classrooms and I have surprising advice on that to a lot of people. I don't say resist all interruptions.
[16:35]
I don't say pretend I'm not here. Don't call me for any reason. I'm in classrooms. I'm completely inaccessible. That's not what I recommend doing. I recommend going through the classroom walkthrough interruption matrix with your office staff, with your admin team and saying, okay, what are the real interruptions that I want to interrupt me if I'm doing classroom walkthroughs?
[16:51]
And what are those issues that I want you to just kind of tell me about when I get back to the office? Because I'm not going to be gone long, 10, 15, 20 minutes at most, maybe double that if I'm doing two back to back. And if I have a student who is upset and needs to talk to me, maybe they can wait a few minutes, probably not going to keep them waiting an hour. But there are different issues that have kind of different characteristics and different needs of our time. And some of those issues, of course, can be handled completely by your office staff. You don't need to be involved in them at all.
[17:18]
And other issues need to involve you to some extent all the way up to interrupting you immediately. Like if the fire department shows up or your boss shows up, you may want your staff to get you no matter what you're doing, but you need to make those decisions together and get on the same page about them. So the classroom walkthrough interruption matrix is one of the tools that we include to help you get into classrooms every day. And we're not going to talk about everything included in the challenge. You can see that at principalcenter.com slash challenge and make a decision as to whether that is helpful to you.
[17:46]
Even if you don't take the challenge, even if you don't use any of our premium tools, I hope this is helpful. in focusing your attention on frequency. Get into classrooms every single day, print yourself a class roster, and keep track of your visits. Print yourself a copy of your teacher evaluation criteria and keep those handy, even if you're not using a repertoire app. Keeping those criteria handy will really give you a vocabulary to use in your conversations with teachers about their practice. And as you get started, final word, be present and pleasant.
[18:16]
Enjoy your time in classrooms. Make this something that you look forward to and make it something that teachers look forward to. And that's going to lead to long-term success. That's what I have for you today. Thank you for tuning in to this special episode of Principal Center Radio. I'm Justin Baeder, and you can learn more about what we've talked about today at principalcenter.com challenge.
[18:35] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
