4 Protocols That Can Shift Your Teacher-Leadership Meetings From Drab to
Fab
School principals and district-level leaders often have difficulty finding the
balance between completing management tasks and engaging in
instructional-leadership practices. However, one place where leaders can hone
their instructional-leadership skills are within the very meetings that have
already been established in their schools or districts. Unfortunately, taking
a meeting from a place where adults are talked at and switching it to a place
where adults learn from one another requires a shift in mindset.
In the work I do focusing on de-implementation, which is the abandonment of
low-value practices (van Bodegom-Vos L. et al. 2017), I often poll
participants in the audience to ask what they would most likely agree to
de-implement within their own practices. Meetings are one of the top answers.
I’m not debating that teachers and leaders may meet too many times. That is
for them to decide. However, I do believe that meetings could be a wonderful
opportunity for leaders and teachers to engage in learning together. And that
could simultaneously help leaders develop the credibility that seems so
elusive when it comes to instructional leadership, as well as provide a venue
where the voices and ideas of teachers can be elevated.
If leaders truly care about the well-being of their staff and are also looking
for ways to support their staffs’ ideas, then they must be willing to engage
in meetings that focus on learning. They must also give educators the
opportunity to process the information they glean at those meetings, which
could now be referred to as professional learning and development.
Lately, I have had countless conversations with leaders and teachers who say
they don’t feel supported. The issue is that they have a common language
around the word “support,” but they don’t have a common understanding of what
support means. It’s almost as if lack of support is a go-to comment, but no
one takes the time to enter into a conversation to define the word. Protocols
can help alleviate this issue.
My friend Jenni Donohoo is an expert at using protocols, and I have learned a
lot from her over the years. Two of the protocols I am highlighting here are
practices that we have used together in some of our joint work, and she has
influenced me to use protocols much more often.
I have been using the first two protocols over the last few years both for
in-person work and my online courses. As with any blog post that I write in
which I focus on a specific number of books, strategies, etc., I know there
are many other options I could have highlighted. If you are interested in
sharing your go-to protocols, please feel free to do it on social media along
with this blog.
1. Success Criteria – Although developing success criteria is a valuable
strategy for teachers to use with students when it comes to highlighting what
students will learn during a lesson, I find that it is also a great protocol
to use with an audience of educators.
In the workshops, coaching sessions, or keynotes that I facilitate, I use
Mentimeter (learn more about it here) to ask the audience what they want to
learn while they are working with me. Believe it or not, I often find there
are educators in the audience who have been “voluntold” to be there and really
haven’t a clue what they will actually be learning. My goal as a facilitator
is to make sure I connect to the educators in the room as much as possible.
Success criteria help me meet that goal.
How it works: After providing the audience of educators with my success
criteria for the session, I then ask them to take a few minutes to provide
some specific learning they would like to engage in during our time together.
They have a code through Mentimeter and can input their success criteria that
everyone in the room can see on the Mentimeter screen. Here is a YouTube video
I created focusing on the topic of developing success criteria.
2. SWOT – When running professional learning and development, I see part of my
role as facilitating conversations among teams that often go unsaid back at
their schools or districts. If partners or teams want to authentically
collaborate with one another, then they need to challenge each other’s
thinking and engage in some difficult conversations.
SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats,
and the protocol allows educators and their leaders the opportunity to have
those difficult conversations, because it gives everyone the opportunity to
talk about positive issues and negatives ones. Of course, it’s up to the
facilitator to set the condition of psychological safety so the people in the
room feel comfortable having those conversations.
How it works: Typically, I provide the audience with the image below. They are
given 20-30 minutes to focus their SWOT discussion on whatever the focus of
the day may be while they are in the professional learning session. For my
work, it’s usually a SWOT analysis on instructional leadership, developing
collective leader efficacy, or beginning the de-implementation process.
As a facilitator, I believe it’s important for the audience to have time to
connect the content to work that they are already doing or ask me questions
that they still have about the content. When it comes to interesting, it gives
me the opportunity to see what parts of the learning is resonating for them
the most. And of course, the Q for question provides us with the opportunity
to explore some questions they have where the work is concerned.
4. Realm of Concern – Too often when educators come to professional learning
and development, they do not always see what they have influence over back at
school. What we know is that when educators and leaders do not see what they
have influence over, it can lead to a lack of agency and motivation.
Considering our present teacher shortage, and those who are leaving the
profession in droves, we should all do what we can to make sure educators
leave our professional learning sessions feeling motivated and empowered. This
is where the Realm of Concern protocol comes in, which is another that I
learned from Donohoo.
How it works: Using the image below, I make sure that all of the educators in
the room have access to Post-it notes, chart paper, and markers. Educators
need to write each area of concern they hold on individual Post-it notes. Each
participant can do this individually or if they come as a team, they can
decide together which concerns should be written on the notes.
After the teams are finished writing each concern on Post-it notes, they are
asked to stick all of the notes on the section of the chart paper that says
Realm of Concern. After they finish placing the notes on the Realm of Concern
area, they have to engage in a discussion and decide which notes they feel
they have influence over (not control) and move them to the section of the
chart that says Realm of Influence.
It is interesting to hear the conversations focusing on what people believe is
a concern but not within their influence. There were a few times when a team
wrote that student engagement was a concern, but they did not believe they had
influence over it. That is where facilitators step in to unpack that concern.
Find What Matters. Get Rid of What Doesn’t. Your Mental Health Depends on It
A time when teachers, leaders, and students recharge their batteries, shake
off the stress from last year, and take time to focus on reading books that do
not involve education. That’s a good thing, because according to an Education
Week Research Center survey, “91percent of teachers experience job-related
stress sometimes, frequently, or always.” Teachers are not alone in the
job-related stress department. A well-known combined study by the National
Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and the Learning Policy
Institute (LPI) found that 42 percent of school principals have considered
leaving their jobs.
The issue with summer is that when teachers and leaders recharge, they promise
themselves that they will do things differently in their classrooms and school
buildings, but when the school year begins, many times they revert to old
habits.
I have been guilty of continuing on that same hamster wheel. As a teacher and
former school leader I used to to suffer from anxiety, as well as never
feeling like I gave enough to the schools where I worked. As an author and
workshop facilitator, I was on the road about 45 weeks a year prior to COVID.
I used to wear that as some sort of badge of honor because it showed how busy
I was and that my work was in demand. Then, in March 2020, COVID came crashing
into our lives, and everything stopped as far as road travel and in-person
professional learning was concerned.
I quickly had to pivot my work into remote sessions to accommodate schools and
organizations that were trying to focus on instructional leadership, which was
the focus of my book that came out the month before COVID.
My Mental Health Flourished
Something that was more important happened for me at that time. I was home. I
had always promised myself and my partner that I would be on the road less,
but I never held the promise. How many teachers and leaders promise their
partners, spouses, and children that they will not work on the weekends or
late into the night and then find themselves backtracking on those promises?
During COVID, I found myself with the opportunity to be home. Yes, I was in my
office from the very early morning to late in the evening due to transferring
everything from in person to remote, along with working in different time
zones. However, once a week, I would go up north to stay with my mom, who was
in her mid-80s. My siblings and I were worried about her being isolated
because she still lived alone in the house she and my dad built in 1959.
On those nights I stayed up at my childhood home, my mom and I would bring
dinner over to my sister Trish and brother-in-law Hassan. My nephew Khalil and
his wife, Richele, would come over with their dog, Elbie. During the warm
months, we sat on their back deck. In the colder months, we sat in the garage
with a heater. My sister was going through her second battle with cancer, and
we needed to be careful because all this was before we had a vaccine.
At heart, I was always a bit of a mama’s boy because I called her almost every
day, even while I was traveling, just to check in on her. I texted with Trish
and my oldest brother, Frank, every day. My mom and sister always came with me
on at least one work trip per year, and we vacationed together with my partner
once a year as well. This time, however, our trips did not revolve around my
work. Those promises of being home more were coming true, and I became one of
the people who actually benefited from COVID, because I was forced to find a
work-life balance and I was happy to do so.
Teachers and leaders are fully committed to their jobs and many times think
that anything other than working seven days a week means they don’t care about
their work. I know it was an opinion I held. COVID forced many of us to find a
balance between being innovative and actually being present with family and
friends. In my case, I didn’t understand how distracted I was until I
committed to being more present with my family.
In fact, in the fall of last year, I began writing a book called
De-implementation: Creating the Space to Focus on What Works (Corwin Press,
2022), because I was heavily concerned about the mental health of leaders and
teachers. I was tired of hearing people say that well-being and mental health
were just about giving teachers and leaders the opportunity to breathe. In my
experience, mental health and well-being are about doing what you love but
making time to spend time with those you love. Mental health and well-being is
about doing things that are impactful personally and professionally and not
spending energy on those things that waste our time, and that is what
de-implementation is all about.
Informal de-implementation – A team is not required, and this action can be
taken immediately. One of the most popular suggestions was that of reducing
the number of times we check email or give assessments to students.
Formal de-implementation – A team is needed to make this decision. An example
could be replacing zero-tolerance policies with restorative-justice practices.
For formal de-implementation, I created a de-implementation checklist and
pacing chart and provided other samples that will help leaders and teachers
formalize the process.
For full disclosure, every school team can find an initiative that they can
focus on for the formal de-implementation process, but we need not wait for a
team to engage in the informal de-implementation process. Every single day we
wake up matters, and we should look at the time we do control and make sure
that we are engaging in valuable actions during those times.
In actuality, de-implementation is as much about how we implement as it is
about what we need to suspend or get rid of because we found something more
impactful. It is about finding the balance between work and home, and it
certainly doesn’t mean we care less about our students and job. Instead, it
means we want to take action to be more committed to our everyday lives. What
I didn’t realize during writing the book is that I would once again learn how
important work-life balance truly is because life is precious.
We often promise ourselves that we will slow down or that we will take more
time to find the elusive work-life balance we always strive for as we get
older. Unfortunately, we revert to old habits because we tell ourselves that
if we work less, we must care less about our profession or the kids. I believe
that the opposite is true, because I feel that when we have a better balance
between home and work, we are more impactful in what we do. Stepping back
allows us the time to focus on what matters, and that is good for our mental
health and well-being.
During COVID, Frank, whom I am close with, had a massive heart attack, which
scared us all. That emphasized for me that being home more was important
because family will not always be around. Having lost our dad in 1982, we knew
all too well how precious life is but somehow forgot as time went on.
Thankfully, Frank is doing well now.
After writing the first draft of the de-implementation book, though, my mom
passed away. It was the day before last Thanksgiving, and Trish, Frank, and I
were there to say goodbye. Four months later, Trish passed away surrounded by
family, including Frank and me. My mom and sister are two major reasons for
any success that I may have, because they urged me to get an associate degree.
I am the first in my family to get a college degree. I never let them forget
how grateful I was to have had them in my corner.
As we approach this coming school year, don’t take for granted that family
will always be there or that your mental health can take a backseat to
something more important like your work. Don’t get me wrong. I loved being a
teacher for 11 years, a principal for eight years, and coaching and running
workshops based on my own work for the last eight years, but we will all be
better at our work if we spend every day that we can connecting with family
and friends and having a life, too.
