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No one argues any more that principals must take on the role of being an instructional leader in their schools. It is widely accepted, but often having credibility in that role is difficult when principals do not have experience teaching, or don’t really understand what being an instructional leader means. Author of the book The Principal as Instructional Leader: A Practical Handbook, Sally Zepeda points out that, “Principals who are instructional leaders ‘link’ the work of leadership and learning to everyone in the school.” Furthermore, these school leaders are charged with building an instructional program that “links the mission and vision of their schools to:

• supervising instruction
• evaluating teachers
• providing professional development and other learning opportunities for teachers
• modeling proactive uses of data to make informed decisions that positively affect student learning
• promoting a climate of instructional excellence
• establishing collegial relationships with teachers.

With this list of charges to principals as instructional leaders, it is easy to see why leading instruction in a school is a daunting task, and that does not even consider all the other roles principals assume, from facilities management, budgeting, to public relations and customer service. But for 21st century school leaders, being an instructional leader is not an add-on role any longer, it is at the core of transforming schools in 21st century institutions with learning at the center. Zepeda’s book The Principal as Instructional Leader is a hands-on guidebook for the school leader as instructional leader taking on this role.

Book Cover

The Principal as Instructional Leader: A Practical Guidebook is just as its title implies, a practical guidebook to instructional leadership that avoids becoming entangled in all the theories of learning,curriculum, and instruction that other books on instructional leadership often do. It provides principals, potential principals, and teacher leaders with comprehensive but concise information needed to tackle those things instructional leaders must tackle to improve student learning.

Often, books on instructional leadership get enmeshed in theory and rationale and never recover enough to rise above “textbookese” to give school leaders the tools to take on this most important role. This book does that. It relentlessly focuses on the practical side of supervising instruction. Readers are provided with an overview of what instructional leadership is, what the process looks like, and then given specific tools to carry out that role  in their schools or educational institutions.

After Zepeda briefly describes what instructional leadership is, she then ties that role to the vision and culture of the school. She also includes a complete overview of the instructional supervision process, and provides an extensive list of observational tools as supplemental downloads. These downloadable tools give principals the means to walk into classrooms and observe specific instructional elements such as “Beginning of Class Routines” or “Using Bloom’s Taxonomy and Levels of questions.” Each of the downloads are observation instruments to gather data regarding specific aspects of classroom teaching and student learning.

The Principal as Instructional Leader: A Practical Handbook is a definite reference book that every school leader, from teacher leader to district superintendent needs to have in their school administration library. I have read other books on this aspect of school leadership, but Zepeda provides the most no-nonsense approach to instructional leadership yet. Definitely an excellent addition to your reading list.

In a meeting this past Monday I attended, representatives from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction provided educators with a presentation describing how our state is adding a sixth standard to our teacher evaluation and an eighth standard to our principal evaluation directly tying those evaluations to test scores. What I discovered at that meeting was that the standards proposed are worded innocuously and can hardly be questioned. For example the teacher standard reads:

"Teachers contribute to the academic success of students. The work of the teacher results in acceptable, measurable progress for students based on established performance expectations using appropriate data to demonstrate growth."

I would think just about all teachers hope that what they're doing is contributing to the academic success of their students. The big difference in opinions among educators, however, is perhaps what this "academic success" is and whether growth measured by a test score is accurate. The principal standard is also written in this hard-argue-against language:

"ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT LEADERSHIP: School executives will contribute to the academic success of students. The work of the school executive will result in acceptable, measurable progress for students based on established performance expectations using appropriate data to demonstrate growth."

Both of these standards make sense on the surface. There's no educator alive who would argue that teachers and principals are not responsible for the achievement of their students. In my years as an educator, there's not a day that passes where concern about whether our students are learning what we're asking them to do isn't on my mind. The problem is not with these standards, but it is with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction's interpretation of what "student achievement" is. Under their plan, student achievement = growth on standardized test scores. While that is a nice, neat simplification of what achievement is, it ignores all learning that can't be tested with standardized testing. By interpreting student achievement as test score growth, the state is simply making testing in North Carolina even higher-stakes than before. With this test-emphasis, we will be well on our way to becoming test-prep factories that don't churn out educated students, but excellent test-takers. North Carolina is going to subject students to tests early and often, not to measure student progress, but to measure how well the teacher is doing. This betrays an underlying, but mistaken belief that tests can be used to tell you how teachers and principals are doing. North Carolina has defined "effective teaching" and "effective school administration" as simply growth demonstrated (by whatever model they can create) by test score performance.

Ultimately, the meeting I attended was billed as an opportunity for educators like myself to provide "feedback" to North Carolina Department of Public Instruction personnel on this proposed teacher evaluation change. However, in practice, it seemed more of a here's-what-we're-going-to-do-to-you session, but we want to give the "appearance that we're listening to educators." (That's a tactic perfected by Arne Duncan.) During the session, when educators expressed concerns about what the state is planning to do, they were often cut off by DPI personnel who interrupted to defend the state's plans rather than sincerely allowing educators to voice their concerns and listening. They felt the need to stifle honest opinion by cutting off people while they were speaking. Instead of being an opportunity to express concerns, it was an opportunity for the state of North Carolina to try to summarily dismiss those concerns.

To this educator, there are two equally frightening things about this whole test-centered approach to teacher and principal evaluations that I and other educators at this meeting tried to bring up, but the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction representatives quickly let us know that we were wrong.

• First of all, North Carolina is planning to evaluate teachers and administrators  by using test scores this spring even though they have not decided what growth model they are going to use, nor do they know exactly how this evaluation is going to take place. What's worse, they will not know at least until February of this year when the State Board has an opportunity to hear the first reading. In typical bureaucratic fashion, they are rolling out a program and implementing it even before it is finalized and clearly defined. Historically, I can recall two other examples of North Carolina Department of Public Instruction initiatives that were rolled out before they were defined well. These were when the state during the 1990's rolled out the ABC Accountability Model, and in the early 2000s, when the state rolled out the NC WISE student data system used throughout the state. Both of these were rolled out without any deep thought on its practical application in the districts. They were both rolled out bugs and all, and classroom teachers and educators had to suffer while the state got its act together. Now, it appears our State Department of Public Instruction is doing it yet again, except this time there are much higher stakes tied to it. North Carolina will be evaluating educators' careers based on something that isn't even clearly defined, and won't be until three-fourths of the year is completed.
• Secondly, North Carolina is also planning to create tests for every single subject taught, administer these tests, and use the results, not to see how students are doing, but to see if teachers and principals are able to raise test scores. Recently, Charlotte-Mecklinburg proposed this "test-everything-that-moves" approach, and it blew up in the administration's face so bad, they had to take money from Bill Gates and the Broad foundation to hire public relations personnel to try to sell it. If something smells so bad that you have to repackage it to sell, then perhaps there's something fundamentally wrong with it. In spite of the fact that educators at this meeting expressed concern over how much more time we will spend testing under this proposal, and how problematic it will be to implement, the Department of Public Instruction personnel at this meeting dismissed these concerns outright repeatedly, and told us how wrong we were.