Supervising Principals for Instructional Leadership: A Teaching and Learning Approach

[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. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_02:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Dr. Meredith Honig and Dr. Lydia Rainey. Dr. Honig is a professor of education, policy, organizations, and leadership at the University of Washington. And Dr. Rainey is a research scientist at the University of Washington and director of research for the District Leadership Design Lab, which they co-founded.

[00:35]

And we're here today to talk about their new book, Supervising Principles for Instructional Leadership, a Teaching and Learning Approach.

[00:43] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:45] SPEAKER_02:

Meredith and Lydia, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Well, I'm very excited to speak with you, Meredith. I know we've worked together in the past when you were a faculty member in programs that I went through at UW. And Lydia, I think we were students at the same time at UW in our doc programs. I'm excited to talk with you today about principal supervision because I feel like it's a topic that gets overlooked. It's really an afterthought in so many districts.

[01:11]

And I'm excited that you have been pursuing this line of research and thought leadership and put this book together. What needs did you see in the field within the education profession that prompted you to focus on these aspects of principal supervision?

[01:25] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so the research that's in the book is really part of a broader research program, a broader set of partnerships we have with districts that recognizes the importance of central offices on the whole as really important to supporting school principals. And we know this from all kinds of research that school principals really need support I mean, they have an incredible job to do, and it's hard to do that job alone, and it really takes the central office. But central offices have really been neglected by federal policymakers, state policymakers, by philanthropic organizations. So when we started this research 15, 20 years ago, it was really with a look at central offices and how they could operate as engines of support for educational equity and school principals

[02:17]

equity leadership in particular. And so we've had a great opportunity to study districts really trying to strengthen their central office. And one of the key aspects of that, especially in our most recent study, has been their recognition of the importance of redefining the principal supervisor role, which makes sense, right? You remember your principal supervisors, how important they were to just supporting you, your sense of your role. And the district's that we've learned from about what's possible with principal supervisors, they said, you know, the job for a principal of being instructional leaders is so important. It should also be the central job of the person that their career most depends on, and that's their supervisor.

[03:05] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think that we partnered with districts that were really trying to redesign that role and spent years following them. What they were trying to do was, like Meredith said, really make sure that this resource in the principal supervisor, which had been underutilized by focusing a lot on compliance, a lot on the oftentimes state mandated evaluation process, Really transform that into a role that supports principals growth as equity focused instructional leaders.

[03:33] SPEAKER_02:

I appreciate the direct attention you're paying to the role of the principal supervisor because in so many districts, it seems like principal supervision is an afterthought. that the assistant superintendent or the area director or perhaps the superintendent personally who supervises principals is busy with so many other things, being kind of a political figurehead, worrying about finances and facilities, dealing with operational issues and putting out those fires in order to keep things running, that the idea of an instructional leadership relationship between a principal and a principal supervisor is almost not a reality. in many districts. Where did that conversation start? What conversations began in the districts that you were working with that helped them really gain some traction in redefining that role and starting to say, wait a minute, maybe our executive directors, maybe our assistant superintendents should not just be strategic planning and fire-putter-outers and accountability people, but should actually be there

[04:38]

in support and in service of school principals and in the service of their development as instructional leaders? How did that kind of begin in the districts that you worked with?

[04:46] SPEAKER_01:

In the districts that we worked with, the focus on principal supervisors really began with the central office itself and leaders recognition that we know in education that barriers to equity are systemic and central offices are main parts of those systems. but central offices have been neglected in terms of resources, in terms of support. So they really asked the ambitious question, what's possible with the central office? Like how might we redesign what each and every staff person does to ensure that it's the right work, really aligned with equitable teaching and learning in schools. And just as part of that broader rethinking, they took a hard look at each and every staff person. And when they got to the principal supervisor, In large districts it was typically an area superintendent someone who was responsible for you know a team of staff like a region of the central office and they really couldn't associate that job with any tangible outcomes.

[05:52]

Definitely not outcomes related to instruction but also not even better service to schools in terms of operations. And it was a very expensive position. In smaller systems, it's the superintendent who supervises principals and those superintendents have realized teaching and learning is so important. So it really started there with concerns for equity, for high quality teaching and learning and the mismatch between what central offices have historically done and what the work of supporting equitable teaching and learning really takes.

[06:29] SPEAKER_02:

I appreciate your mentioning of just the tangible support, the support for operational issues. And I think about the work that my supervisors, I think I had three different direct supervisors when I was a principal in Seattle, people that fortunately I think you had the opportunity to work with and train and kind of create that context for that relationship of support. But I always felt very supported by my supervisors as a principal, that they were there to go to bat for me if I picked up the phone and said, hey, I've got a problem. They were there to help me solve that problem. How are districts designing the role of a principal supervisor so that not only are people in that role available to support and to solve problems and to help, but also to develop? Because I feel like that's the less urgent work

[07:21]

that maybe gets put on the back burner forever because there's so much urgent work. There's so many fires to put out. So how do districts redesign that role so that principal development really takes the foreground?

[07:33] SPEAKER_00:

I think there's really two main steps that districts take when they're thinking about shifting principal supervisors from focusing on the compliance, from being the fire-putter-outer. I love that expression that you use. And to taking a teaching and learning approach and adding in what you're suggesting adding in the support of their their professional growth as instructional leaders in their schools. And the first broad set of changes districts make to shift over is to really start by helping principal supervisors shed the old role of focusing just on the technical aspects of the job. So some of the things those districts do is they completely rewrite principal supervisors' job descriptions to focus almost exclusively on principal development and support.

[08:30]

They get rid of a lot of the old, more technical aspects of the job. They don't just add on supporting principals' growth. Similarly, they change their hiring processes. So they're making sure that they're hiring for folks that aren't interested in using the principal supervisor role as a stepping stone to becoming an assistant superintendent or even superintendent, focusing on trying to identify people who are really interested in supporting principals as they grow, really supporting them as adult learners. They reorganize how their principals and principal supervisors are grouped. Sometimes they shrink the number of principals the principals oversee.

[09:06]

sometimes they change the position of who the principal supervisors report to, making them report into this superintendent, for example, to give them more positional authority. And then they also really, what we've found in our districts that we've worked with when they think about shedding the old is they have to work with the rest of the central office so that they're not, principals aren't relying on their principal supervisor and other departments in the in the central office aren't relying on the principal supervisor to sort of be the connector the person who makes this puts out the emergency puts out the fires takes care of the emergencies. And so they really start by working with the rest of the central office to help them focus on supporting schools and school leaders. So the other part of the other really big shift is that that districts need to make as they're starting to rethink how they're supervising principals.

[10:02]

is help their principal supervisors learn how to take a teaching and learning approach. And here, what we found was that using outside coaching oftentimes, surprisingly enough, does not really help principal supervisors grow in this way. And it's actually the supervisor of principal supervisors. So that's oftentimes a central or chief academic officer, a CAO, who really helps coach and elevate the role of supporting principals in a way that we just see outside coaching not really being able to do. And then principal supervisors who are able to shift and redesign their role to support principals really take control of their own learning and really figure out what they need to learn so that they can better support principals and figure out if they're going to be meeting with their other principal supervisor colleagues, if they're going to be attending conferences or reading books to help meet those needs that they see within themselves.

[11:04] SPEAKER_01:

And I would just add a few things. One of them is our book. We tried to make our book really grounded in our research because we think, you know, in all the work we do with leaders, they ask us, what does research teach us? We tried to be sticklers for the research, but also really practical. So there's lots of kind of tips and tools in the book to help districts get started. I'd say all of it goes to complete hell unless districts really do a couple things.

[11:38]

One of them is really wrap their minds around that this is a fundamental change in the role. So it's not, we're not talking about when Lydia talks about rewriting the job description and Changing the number of principals that report to certain supervisors sometimes districts take those ideas and and hear them in a technical way. But these aren't technical changes. These are fundamental shifts in the nature of principal support from trying to help principals get better mainly by monitoring them to helping principals get better in the ways that all professionals get better which is by nurturing them and helping them grow with coaching and positive strengths-based support and also really positioning the learner as a professional. So much professional development in districts gets done to teachers, to principals.

[12:32]

And the paradigm shift with the principal supervisors that we're talking about is really not principal supervisors driving the learning of principals, but helping principals lead their own learning like great professionals do. do across sectors. That's what doctors do. That's what lawyers do. So helping them be that kind of professional in a system that has not always treated principals professionally is a whole bucket of work. And so thing one is to really appreciate the fundamental nature of that change and be inspired by it, not discouraged by it, because it's possible.

[13:11]

Districts do it. And two, to understand that you can't just stop with the supervisor. Because supervisors only last so long shifting their role in these ways with the rest of the system not changing. Unless human resources, professional development also starts to shift to really elevate the role of the principal as an instructional leader, supervisors get really bogged down in a lot of the old work they've been asked to do.

[13:40] SPEAKER_02:

Well, thinking about how we kind of fundamentally rethink some of those roles and those forms of support that principal supervisors provide to the principals they lead, you know, one thing that comes to mind for me is the monthly meeting or the, you know, the biweekly principal meeting, however often we meet. as a kind of senior leadership team or whatever the structure of the district is where we get principals together, maybe pull them out of schools for the day. What were some of the maybe patterns of dysfunction that you saw districts striving to address? What's broken about the principal meeting or principal professional development the way it's typically done? And what are the districts that you studied doing differently to make better use of that time and to build principals capacity in those PD settings?

[14:26] SPEAKER_01:

Well for one thing again the key question that district leaders were asking is how does X how does principal supervisors role how does pulling principals out of their buildings for all these meetings how does that matter if at all to the improvement of teaching and learning. So they when when the districts that we've worked with really asked that question They recognize, again, a total mismatch between how professionals learn and how those meetings are set up. Professionals don't learn when you pull them out of their setting where they're working and put them in a room and deliver a bunch of information to them. And a lot of districts say, well, we've shifted our focus in the meetings from a lot of operational matters to instruction.

[15:18]

And what they typically mean is, We used to deliver a lot of information about operations to principals, and now we deliver a lot of information to them about instruction. And, you know, the leaders in the districts we studied, you know, were willing to say these meetings are not helpful. And, again, we need to treat principals as professionals and assume that there's information out there they need, they'll go get it, and we need to protect their time. and really think about how do people learn, how do principals especially learn, and how can we structure the meetings around how they learn best.

[15:58] SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely, because I think we put so much thought into, hopefully, put so much thought into teacher professional development because there are so many more teachers. We know we need to set that up and plan that more thoroughly. And often because principals are so few in number, their professional development is often considered kind of an afterthought that we'll just have somebody show up as a presenter or we'll have a topic and we won't really think through it with the same level of effort that we might put into teacher professional development. And I think there's also this tendency for principals to feel like after a lot of those meetings that aren't really professional development, that this meeting could have been an email, or lately this Zoom call could have been an email. And I have to think back to one of the key decisions that was made before I started as a principal in Seattle that I just appreciated so much.

[16:48]

The ongoing impact of this was huge. The central office was prohibited from... you know central office administrators were prohibited from just saying to principals hey we need you to do this or here's some information please read this please do xyz for us they had to go through one particular channel which was called principal communicator they had to reach out through this particular channel if they wanted to communicate with principals if they wanted to ask principals for anything and it was a way of Protecting that time and valuing that time and streamlining the different demands that were made of principals so that they were not pulled in even more directions by various central office departments. What does some of the coordination look like among central office leaders?

[17:31]

We know central offices vary so much from district to district where the role of the principal might be largely similar from one school to another, but district central offices seem to vary so much to me. What were some of the patterns that you saw in how people work together in the central office, even across the vast variation between districts of different sizes?

[17:52] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, I want to go back to what you said about principals' meetings, because it's important to note that something we highlight in the book, that it's not just that districts said, we're going to stop pulling principals out of their buildings and discontinue these kind of information-focused, operations-focused meetings. They also said, and how can we create a powerful learning experience for principals? So part of the pivot for supervisors was, first of all, to think about their meetings with principals from a learning stance. So at the highest end, the most skilled principal supervisors had already been working with their principals on self-assessing their strength areas, their areas for growth, developing learning plans to address those.

[18:46]

And so they had all this information about essentially their learners. And like great classroom teachers, they said, we're going to work with our students, our principals one-on-one. We're also going to convene them in learning communities and build that out as a scope and sequence. So they said, how do we start our learning for this year? What would be a powerful opening? And how do we we grow our learning over the course of the year.

[19:11]

So that, for example, at the start of the year, one principal supervisor was helping his principals work well with data about the quality of teaching. And early on, he started with one piece of data and really helped principals kind of mine it, work together to interrogate that piece of information. And then over time, to get progressively more ambitious with that, working with more varied sources of data, not just relying on the district already available in the district data system, collecting their own data, especially from an anti-racist stance. So the key is really that the principal supervisors who we associated with positive outcomes for principals were really building true learning communities of their principals. And part of that work was to discipline the rest of the system that's used to using those principals meetings to deliver a bunch of information

[20:06]

and empowering supervisors to say, you can't come to our meetings anymore. We got stuff to do. It's focused on instruction. Is it something you could put in a memo? And what you're describing in Seattle was a leadership move that interim superintendent Susan Enfield made to support principal supervisors. She said, look, if the request from HR or the request from budget, if it's so important that that request go directly to principals, it should come to me first.

[20:42]

And I'll check in with the person who wants to take principal's time or principal supervisor's time to really think that through. And one of the things she found is it really disciplined the system to say, hey, you're right. We don't actually need to take principals and principal supervisor's time. They're in schools doing the right work. So we'll figure out another way.

[21:03] SPEAKER_02:

I love it. So the superintendent was actually willing in that case to do the pre-work of vetting the announcement or the information or the request that was to be made of principals, investing her own time in order to save time in that scarce setting of having principals together. And I can remember sitting in principal meetings whenever something kind of snuck onto the agenda that was not a good use of time, you know, somebody's explaining the new software update to the mainframe and the, you know, everybody's looking at each other and checking their watches. And I'm thinking, okay, there are a hundred people here and, you know, a dollar a minute per person where, you know, we're spending, you know, multiple dollars per second on this announcement. And, you know, just, just being willing to, as you said, discipline the system and say, okay, we are going to get our information together We're going to get a plan together before we convene principles and really make an intentional and purposeful use of that time.

[22:00] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And really what Dr. Enfield was doing is it wasn't so much like a vetting move and a monitoring sense. It was really a teaching and learning move because what ultimately happened is people did not come to her with these requests because she invited them to think it through. to really teach themselves, oh, I have been bothering principals basically with all these information items, there's a better way. So that kind of learning orientation is really important to the reculturing of school systems.

[22:35] SPEAKER_02:

Well, Lydia and Meredith, I know you've been doing research, publishing papers for years on this topic. If people want to read those studies that you've previously published or learn more about the book, where can they find all of that online?

[22:48] SPEAKER_01:

So people can find out more about our work on our website, which is dl2.education.uw.edu. A lot of what we've learned about principal supervisors, we really wanted to make accessible to people in a kind of a one-stop shop kind of way. So what they'll find in the book, which we hope people find useful is really the synthesis of our latest research findings, as well as different tools they can use to move this work forward.

[23:15]

And we really encourage districts to work with local partners because the work's really intensive and it takes on the ground support and also to heed the lesson of our research, which is the importance of leading a lot of the learning themselves. So we hope that districts will find some really kind of practical examples of what we already know works, what predictably doesn't work. And that part of what we'll see in the next few years is districts using those ideas and showing us what's next. with principals and principal supervisors. Another resource that we participated in that people may find useful is Digital Promise has produced a series of webinars on various topics. And we had an opportunity to do an interview as part of one of those with Nancy Gutierrez, who runs the New York City Leadership Academy, and really focus on what are the implications of some of the ideas in our book for the right now.

[24:13]

where principals and their supervisors are dealing with incredible challenges, not just of remote learning, but also in extreme budget situations, and also opportunities to really rethink roles, thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and others.

[24:30] SPEAKER_02:

So the book is Supervising Principals for Instructional Leadership, a Teaching and Learning Approach. Lydia and Meredith, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[24:40] SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. Thanks, Justin.

[24:41] Announcer:

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