Pennsylvania Principals Learn What to Look for in Classrooms

“Formative assessments provide a way for principals to know more about what’s occurring in each classroom,” say Susan Brookhart and Connie Moss (Duquesne University) in this Kappan article. “That knowledge then opens the door for the principal to identify areas in which teachers are already successful and areas in which they may need more assistance. Armed with that information, principals are able to have deeper and richer conversations with teachers about their practice.” 

Brookhart and Moss gathered these insights working with teachers and principals over several years in a rural Pennsylvania district. At the outset, principals were confident that their teachers were already using formative assessments well and had student-friendly learning targets. It turned out that wasn’t true. “What caught me off guard about this whole thing is that I have high flyers that I thought were doing this already,” said one principal. “But when I did my observations, that wasn’t the case.” Principals began spending more time in classrooms and developing a better eye for what was really happening.

Not all principals in the project were on this learning curve. Some continued to look superficially at student behavior (Are students on task?) and avoid the details of classroom objectives, assessments, and learning results. But most principals made significant changes in their practice. 

One shift was learning to focus less on what teachers were doing during classroom visits and more on what students were doing. One principal was surprised to find that students with a teacher he thought was engaging and effective were actually quite passive. He said, “The kids never did anything except listen to the teacher and occasionally shake their heads when he asked, ‘Does anybody have a question?’” Another principal was upset to find that the PowerPoint presentations students were creating in another “brilliant” teacher’s classroom over a two-week period were shallow and not aligned with the state curriculum. 

A second shift was principals developing a better eye for what was happening between teachers and students. The best principals began to ask themselves a new set of questions when they visited classrooms:

• Do students know and understand the learning target?
• Are students asking themselves, Where am I going? Where am I now? How can I close the gap? 
• What’s the evidence that students have learned?

One principal noticed that a teacher called only on a few students who raised their hands, affirmed their correct answers, and moved on without finding out if the rest of the class understood. 

A third shift was moving from only praising the exemplary teachers to giving actionable feedback to all teachers. “Giving teachers more specific feedback improved how teachers used formative assessments and also improved collegial conversations with teachers,” say Brookhart and Moss. Principals improved the ways they gave feedback to teachers, both individually and in group e-mails to the staff about what they were noticing around their schools.

“Being the leading learner requires principals to have humility, to value learning, to understand how to learn, and to develop the skill of finding learning opportunities in their schools,” conclude Brookhart and Moss. “Looking at what students are actually doing requires principals to value the actions of children and to respect them as learners, and to learn how to find evidence of learning.” 

“Leading by Learning” by Susan Brookhart and Connie Moss in Phi Delta Kappan, May 2013 (Vol. 94, #8, p. 13-17), www.kappanmagazine.org; Brookhart can be reached at susanbrookhart@bresnan.net. 

From the Marshall Memo #485