In our school district, we are pushing our administrators to be instructional leaders. Part of being an instructional leader means that our administrators have to be in classrooms for the purpose of developing a deep understanding of the teaching and learning going on in their buildings. Our expectation in that administrative teams (Principal + Assistant Principal) document at least 200 classroom walkthroughs during the 2019-2020 school year using our walkthrough tool. A huge shoutout goes to our Director of Curriculum Shauna Smith for pushing this work!!
Every once in a while I have the pleasure of witnessing a picture perfect, mind-blowingly awesome lesson. As other school leaders know, these are the lessons that give you chills when you leave the classroom and fire you up for the rest of your day. When you see one of these lessons, I would encourage you to capitalize on this moment by forwarding the walkthrough feedback (ours gets automatically sent to us in a PDF) along with some extra words of admiration to that teacher as well as school leadership (two examples have been provided below). My experience has been taking the extra time to follow up with that teacher will not only build that employee's confidence, it also helps to strengthen the relationship between myself and the staff member.
