Leading for Instructional Improvement: How Successful Leaders Develop Teaching and Learning Expertise

Part One

Making the Case for Instructional Expertise

Chapter 1

The Leader's Role in Developing Teacher Expertise

The visitor strolling through an herb garden sees what looks like a large-leafed weed. The herbalist sees comfrey, a remedy for burns. The patient can read only the second row on the eye chart. The eye doctor sees 20/100 vision and knows that glasses are needed. The teacher explains the rotation of the earth, sun, and moon. What do the principals observing that classroom lesson see? In our experience, not enough. At least not enough to inform the one most important aspect of their job as instructional leader, which is to provide useful, just-in-time feedback to the teacher and even more important, support the teacher's further professional learning guided by a clear picture of the teacher's strengths and weaknesses and grounded to a deep understanding of quality instruction.

Although the idea of teacher quality has received much greater recognition in recent years as the number one correlate of student achievement (Haycock, 1998; Peske & Haycock, 2006), the concept of teaching and instructional leadership expertise—particularly how one develops expertise—has received scant attention in educational policy and leadership circles. We take for granted that somehow teachers have acquired the deep subject matter and pedagogical expertise required to provide high-quality teaching for all students. Or, worse yet, that great teachers are born with this amorphous gift for high-quality teaching without understanding and acknowledging how professionals deepen their practice over time. Furthermore, we too often fail to consider that even the best university teacher-preparation programs cannot cultivate the kind of deep expertise necessary to teach all students well in a one- or two-year program. Keeping in mind the big idea that teaching is a complex and sophisticated endeavor, school district leaders, principals, and teacher leaders must play a critical role in developing and cultivating the expertise necessary for high-quality teaching. This warrants a brief discussion of the expertise literature, particularly what we mean by expertise and how one goes about acquiring it.

The National Research Council's seminal work on how people learn presents a useful distinction between experts and novices in given disciplines that we see playing out every day in school leadership (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). By studying the differences between experts and novices in a variety of disciplines, Bransford and his colleagues found that experts …have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment (p. 31). This deeper level of seeing and understanding enables experts to think more effectively about problems of practice within their specific discipline. And because a school leader's primary problem of leadership practice is how to improve the quality of teaching, the idea of expertise is particularly germane.

Although Bransford and colleagues’ initial research on expertise was in disciplines other than school leadership, for example, physics, mathematics, history, and so on, our work with school and district leaders is completely consistent with their findings. If we start from the premise that extensive background knowledge affects what one notices and that the act of noticing is indeed an important skill for school leaders intent on improving instruction, then it begs the question of just how much school leaders notice when they go into a classroom. We have led hundreds of school and district leaders on classroom walkthroughs. We have found that there is a vast difference between expert observers and novices in terms of what they notice about the quality of instruction. Specifically we have found that

Novice instructional leaders do not notice or think about key elements of instruction and often convey obvious misconceptions about or misuses of those key elements. However, leaders with greater expertise can identify and discuss key elements with specificity; elaborate on what they see with specific examples, that is, evidence from the observed lesson; express wonder or questions about observations (for example, what is behind teaching decisions); and offer alternatives to teaching decisions or suggest ways to improve the lesson with specificity.

Novices tend to make evaluative judgments more quickly based on superficial understanding. By contrast, experts tend to withhold judgment until they can describe in evidentiary terms what they are noticing along with important questions they may have that will guide further leadership actions.

There is a vast difference between experts and novices in terms of what they wonder about and how they go about posing relevant problems of leadership practice based on what they did or did not notice. Experts in particular tend to be much more metacognitive in their formulation of next steps or specific leadership actions.

We know from experience there is not a widely shared view of what constitutes quality instruction—not among teachers, principals, or school district leaders. We think this poses a fundamental and challenging issue for educational leaders and policy makers. Without a shared understanding of what we mean by quality instruction, we have no basis from which to mount an improvement effort. This is an issue of expertise or in our case a lack of sufficient expertise necessary to improve the quality of teaching in every school and every classroom. The anecdotal observations that lead us to this conclusion also have been corroborated by extensive research by our colleagues at the University of Washington. Chapter Eight will offer a deeper look into this research, so for now we will assume prima facie that the expertise necessary to improve teaching practice is in short supply. This means the primary role of school and district leaders must be the cultivation of expertise to improve practice, including both teaching and leadership practice.

It Takes Expertise to Make Expertise

In various presentations to school district leaders we like to show a slide with pictures of well-known people (athletes, actors, musicians, doctors, scientists, and so on) who are the very best in their field. After displaying their images, we ask the following question: what do these people have in common?

Truthfully, these people may have many things in common but our particular teaching points are threefold:

1. These people all represent professions that have clear and accepted standards for professional practice. There is shared understanding among all in their profession (and often outside their profession as well) about what constitutes quality performance.

2. All of these professionals have improved their given craft with public scrutiny and feedback. Not one of these professionals practices his or her craft in isolation.

3. All of these professionals have had or continue to have extensive coaching. It is understood and accepted that the most powerful way to improve one's craft is through coaching by someone with high expertise.

We believe that K–12 education as often practiced is a quasi-profession at best because we do not in fact have common standards of professional practice. City, Elmore, and colleagues (2009) frame this best in a chapter titled A Profession in Search of a Practice:

We tolerate a kind of benign vagueness in how we talk about the core functions of teaching and learning that privileges good intentions over demonstrable effectiveness in our practice. We sanction unacceptably large variations in teaching from one classroom to another with rhetoric about teaching as style, art, or craft. And we reinforce the public's stereotype of teaching and learning as a knowledge-weak practice by largely refusing to exercise anything but perfunctory control over who gets to practice in classrooms and what happens to people who are demonstrably incompetent. (p. 188)

Whether under the guise of academic freedom, local control, or perhaps just simply doing what we have always done, millions of students are taught every day by hundreds of thousands of teachers, supported by thousands of school and district leaders without a clear understanding and agreement on quality practice. Frankly, this is shocking to consider. Can you imagine leading a team of surgeons in a complex organ transplant without common, accepted, and well-understood standards of surgical practice? We have heard some argue that teaching is different because it's so individual and cannot be measured by the kind of quantitative metrics we use for our athletes such as the lowest round of golf, final score of a basketball game, or by how many seconds by which one wins a swimming competition. However, even in professions in which subjectivity plays into the definition of quality, there are still common accepted standards of practice. The Nobel Prize for scientists, the Pulitzer Prize for writers and journalists, and the Academy Awards for actors have a subjective element of measurement, but make no mistake, each of these awards are based on common, accepted standards of professional practice.

In most other professions than teaching, one thing clearly stands out—expertise is understood and valued. There is complete acceptance that the way to become the best in your field is to nourish and nurture the development of expertise. In the 2009 Los Angeles Open golf tournament Phil Mickelson was the leader after the first round, posting a score well below par. In the second round he posted a score above par and fell out of first place. After his disappointing round, he placed a call to his coach who was living in Las Vegas at the time. His coach flew to Los Angeles and they worked together for hours on the driving range. Mickelson went on to win the golf tournament. What is accepted as standard operating procedure in most professions has been anathema in public education. Can you imagine a teacher, who after struggling with a particular lesson, calling his or her instructional coach to do some work on the driving range? Actually we can imagine this same kind of public coaching cycle taking place in our schools because we are in fact doing this kind of work every day with teachers and principals in schools across the country. However, it is still the very rare exception, not the norm. In far too many cases teachers have no access to coaching, and in cases when they do have access the coach does not have sufficient expertise to help grow the teacher's expertise. In too many other cases the conditions—structural, cultural, political, and so on—preclude a successful coaching relationship between coach and teacher. In all cases it goes back to the leaders’ own expertise and their conception of how to grow theirs and others’ expertise.

One effort to address professional practice that has swept schools across the country is the creation of professional learning communities (PLCs). Most everywhere we visit, there is a major PLC initiative underway. The concept of professional learning communities popularized by Richard DuFour is sound (Dufour & Eaker; 1998). Implicit in the creation of professional learning communities is the idea that continued learning is key to improving practice; that learning is inherently a social process; and that learning can be facilitated—in fact accelerated—through well-developed and supported organizational structures. We believe that the idea of expertise is still not well acknowledged and explicated in the PLC literature but nonetheless the concept of adults studying practice together as a way of improving practice makes sense. Yet in school after school we visit, we see PLCs that have little influence on improving teaching practice, and in some cases the PLC is a structure that ultimately reinforces the current state of teaching. Because schools and school districts are in fact complex organizations, we need to be cautious about attributing one causal factor for the ineffectiveness we see when observing PLCs across the country. The truth is that there are many factors at play that ultimately lie at the heart of leadership. Yet one idea in particular that is worthy of deeper consideration is the idea of expertise. Before school leaders consider forming professional learning communities, there are two important questions to consider:

1. What role does expertise play in promoting group and individual learning?

2. How much internal expertise—in terms of internal to the group—is necessary to accelerate group and individual learning?

From our observations at least one factor limiting the effectiveness of PLCs is an insufficient level of expertise within the group necessary to advance the learning of that group. Let's think about this in another context. Suppose a group of eight snow skiers come together as a learning community to study skiing with the expressed purpose of improving their skill level. This, of course, is step one—actually coming together with the expressed purpose of improving their knowledge and skills versus attending to their other adult needs. As it turns out, the skill level of the group ranges from novice to perhaps a beginning intermediate level. The group meets on the ski slopes every weekend during the ski season to ski together, watch each other ski, and offer tips for improvement as necessary. In between they read books on skiing and watch videos of expert skiers tackling challenging terrain. It is not unreasonable to assume that over time individual group members could improve their skills. Much of this would depend on how well the group functions, adherence to agreed-on norms, the amount of time dedicated to study and practice, and so on. There are indeed important organizational and sociocultural aspects of learning that play out within and among group members. Suppose, however, that this group of skiers had access to at least one expert skier—whether within the group itself or as an outside coach to the group. There is no question this one change could accelerate the group's learning along with the skill development of each individual group member. This idea of access to expertise—either internally or externally—is a fundamental challenge for leaders interested in creating professional learning