The Principals’ Corner: 

When the two years of work was over, the various committees had done a superb job of clarifying expectations. What they placed in front of the Heads’ Council for decision were the following:

• a detailed description of what effective classroom instruction should look like. The model was heavily influenced by the writings of Hunter and others with some major changes suggested by the committee
• a “roughed-out” supervision document that was based directly on the model, and
• a set of suggestions on what the responsibilities were for the teacher, the department head, the vice-principal and the principal

After some debate over a two-month period, the Heads’ Council approved a modified version of the model.  It was an attendant document for supervising that could be used to fit into the district’s mandated form and a compromise position on the role of the department head (with the tacit agreement of the federation).

What was not identified was the manner in which the information on planning and evaluation of student achievement would be gathered and assessed (i.e. the document pertained to instruction, 1/3 of the tripartite activity known as “teaching”).  Let’s look at each of these three outputs and see what the school came up with.

The model, as noted above, was influenced by Madeline Hunter.  It included items from her teachings (underlined below).

A lesson should include:

• Objectives written in terms of student learning outcomes
• The use of the concept of anticipatory set to start a lesson
• Clear description of what the teacher would be required to do to achieve the student learning outcome (i.e. a teaching strategy which was defined as “set of observable teaching behaviours designed and implemented by the teacher to achieve the objective”)
• Clearly defined in-class method of checking for understanding
• Follow-up in terms of guided practice and independent practice only after checking for understanding

The result was a clear statement to the staff of what would be assessed with classroom visits.   In other words, the “rules of the game” were made known to everyone.  While not stated in the document itself (but repeated again and again over the next few years) was the belief that teachers should still be given a wide degree of autonomy in selecting strategies that worked for the students and the teacher.  The teacher’s understanding of the class and the subject matterwas respected in this regard.

What was deemed not negotiable was the need for a learning objective for each lesson and the need to check for understanding of what had been taught before to allow the students to go forward with homework or assignments.  The traditional: “Any questions?” was not seen as terribly effective in this regard.

It was a great start to the initiative for two reasons:

• It was staff driven.
• It gave all staff and administrators a “language of instruction”.

This served all of us well.  We now had a set of expectations that we all understood and those expectations informed the narrative of supervision of staff for the next few years.

December 17th blog:  Who does what?  What roles do the heads in particular play?  What happens to the documentation?

Dr. Dan

Check out our Education Services under Individual Coaching and Contracted Services.  There’s a wide range of Teacher Appraisal topics including: Writing Effective Performance Appraisals; Conducting Effective Evaluation Conferences with Teachers; Having Hard Conversations; and more.