Teach Effectively!

In “Out of the Office and into the Classroom: An initiative to help principals focus on instruction,” Holly Holland describes an initiative aimed at promoting school principals as instructional leaders. Writing for the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA, US), Ms. Holland reports on using administrative managers to handle some of the routine work of a school that usually falls on its principal, freeing the principal to visit classrooms. Here’s how the Wallace Foundation, which is funding the project, describes it.

For many principals weighed down by the time demands of bus schedules and budgets, improving instruction too often takes a back seat. This brief journalistic account describes how schools in nine states are testing a new position, called School Administration Manager (SAM), whose job is to help free principals of many of these administrative distractions and allow them to spend more time on instructional matters. The goal of this promising new approach, pioneered by the Jefferson County (KY) Public Schools with Wallace’s support, is to hire a SAM to assume operational functions, track the principal’s time to see how much she is spending on instruction, and provide coaching to ensure that the principal actually becomes more focused on instruction.

I very much favor having school administrators devote as much time to instruction as they can, so this sounds like a sensible initiative to me. Of course, what we have to hope is that, when those principals get out of their offices and into classrooms, they offer expert advice to their faculties, coaching that is based on evidence about effective practices. It sure would be interesting to follow these newly free principals around their buildings and examine the nature of the recommendations that they make to teachers.

I’ll be very interested in learning about the research that examines this project. Ms. Holland refers to data collection that appears to be focused on process changes. Those data will be interesting, to be sure. However, will anyone study the effects that the project has on students’ outcomes?

Links: The Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, the Wallace Foundation and its page about this initiative.