Leadership With the End in Mind
School administrators, instructional coaches, staff developers, and teacher leaders must
be able to draw direct lines from the work that they do to the achievement of their
students. Teachers should be comfortable that they can verify that time spent in PLCs and
professional development activities connects to increases in student achievement. I
believe the best way to be confident of the link to student achievement is to use a
backwards planning model. This diagram illustrates planning backwards from student
achievement to leadership actions.
The first step in the planning process is to identify the common definition of student
achievement that drives the work of the team or partnership relationship in which leaders
are engaged. If I am leading a staff, a department, a grade-level team, or partnering with a
colleague for coaching, what is the common definition of student achievement that
focusses our work?
For a school staff: what do we agree is a portrait of the fifth grader who exits our school
ready to be successful in middle school or our high school graduate who we believe is
college or career ready? As an instructional coach: what is the teacher’s vision of a
student being successful in her current unit of study?
The second step in the backwards process is to identify what student actions, behaviors,
and experiences are likely to produce the desired achievement goal. It is important to note
that teacher behaviors do not produce student achievement. Students must do the “work”
in order to learn. If athletic coaches can have students get muscles without working out,
it’s through steroids! Short-term success…..Long-term disaster. A music teacher can’t
teach you how to play an instrument. She can teach you how to learn to play the
instrument. You must do the work.
When teachers focus on quickly getting achievement, it often involves tricks, gimmicks,
and strategies that get correct test answers or acceptable rubric scores without the effort
and grappling-with-concepts that lead to true understanding. I believe that identifying the
student work that produces the desired learning is the most challenging work of teachers.
Once we are clear on the necessary student behaviors and experiences that will produce
the desired learning outcome, we cab identify the teacher behaviors most likely to
generate those student actions. We might call these ‘best practices’. However, not all
students respond as expected to best practice. Thus a quality teacher is an expert
implementer of best practice and an innovator of teaching strategies to appropriately
engage students in the necessary student behaviors.
Often the initial role of the teacher is to model and teach the desired student behavior. My
personal work with high school freshman has uncovered that most of them do not know
“how to study”. It’s critical that middle school teachers and freshman teachers teach,
model, and coach students in study practices. When students know learning behaviors,
they can consciously implement them to produce the learning outcome.
PLCs and Instructional Coaches (ICs) should be supporting teachers in identifying the
needed student behaviors and implementing the teacher behaviors that will gain those
student behaviors. In PLCs, teachers should be examining student work and data and
asking, ”What do the students need us as teachers to learn?” If English Language
Learners are struggling in reaching proficiency,” What do we need to do?” ICs, as well as
administrators, should be available to observe in teachers’ classrooms and provide
feedback data that helps a teacher answer questions regarding “what is happening”. Did I
increase the time I provided students to think though a possible solution? What did you
observe happening in cooperative groups after I made facilitative suggestions and then
moved on?
When planning backwards, the last issues to explore are the behaviors of leaders to
support the entire process. (When backward planning, leaders’ behaviors are last….when
implementation starts, leaders go first.) If an increase in student achievement is to be
realized, the start will be in administration and teacher leader behaviors.
Here is a list of questions that can assist leaders in identifying leadership behaviors:
1. What will we as leaders plan for?
2. What will we as leaders monitor?
3. What will we as leaders model?
4. What will we as leaders reinforce through recognition and celebration?
5. What behaviors are we as leaders committed to confront?
Adopted from: http://www.mdk12.org/process/leading/principals_role.html
This backwards process provides check points for those leading school change efforts to
gauge progress:
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Can we identify that leadership behavior changes have occurred?
Is there a noticeable difference in teacher collegial conversations and planning?
Do walkthroughs and observations find that changes in teacher behaviors are
present?
Are there noticeable differences in what students are doing in classrooms?
Only when identifying that the above are present should we expect to see increases in
student achievement.