A Principal Shifts His Focus to Working with Teacher Teams 

In this article in Principal, Kurtis Hewson (University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada) says that when he was first an elementary principal, he did weekly full-lesson observations of teachers. Over time, he realized that this approach was unmanageable, ineffective, and “unwittingly supported a culture of professional isolationism that ran counter to the collaborative practices we strived to establish and support in the school.” He decided to make frequent, short, informal visits to classrooms (which increased his visibility and kept him in touch with students) and devote most of his time to weekly grade-level teacher team meetings. The focus of these one-hour PLCs varied:

• Reviewing student testing data;
• Establishing team norms, learning goals, and professional development priorities;
• Writing curriculum unit plans;
• Developing common assessments;
• Looking at assessment results and student work;
• Every six weeks, monitoring individual students’ progress and crafting interventions to address needs.

Hewson says this shift paid handsome dividends for the school:

• Grade-level teams got better at collaborating around curriculum planning and data-driven instruction. “I was able to challenge some longstanding, questionable instructional practices through collective inquiry and professional dialogue,” he says – far more effectively than would have been possible working with teachers individually. 

• “I gained a much deeper, more informed understanding of the individual learning needs of students in the school through examination of data and the resulting team dialogue than I could have accomplished by viewing the data on my own or observing students in the classroom,” says Hewson. “Over time, this benefited every grade-level team as I gained a more comprehensive understanding of students’ learning background, could connect teachers’ work with students as they progressed to higher grades, and could connect work happening between grade levels.” 

• Hewson’s credibility with teachers increased as he rolled up his sleeves and worked with teams to solve curriculum and instructional problems. 

“Time Shift: Developing Teacher Teams” by Kurtis Hewson in Principal, January/ February 2013 (Vol. 92, #3, p. 14-17), www.naesp.org 

From the Marshall Memo #467