Justin Tarte really nailed it with his most recent post, “Dear Principal: Some things I need you to know…” He captures excellent principalship in the form of five requests teachers can/should ask of their leadership:
- Be open-minded and support experimentation;
- Lead efficient, constructive staff meetings;
- Provide honest, meaningful, discrete feedback;
- Prioritize instructional leadership;
- Minimize busywork.
The article made the rounds around our office, because we strive to build a platform that facilitates all five requests.
We know that every principal wishes to be the leader who fulfills Dr. Tarte’s ideal. We also know that every principal faces tremendous hurdles along the way:
- Identifying growth and “proving” that a teacher learned from previous failures is challenging.
- Staff meetings have a funny way of going off the rails in a matter of seconds. As a former leader of professional development and a teacher, I can attest that teachers are sometimes more difficult students than the students themselves.
- State-mandated compliance measures are often so cumbersome that they defeat the purpose for which they were developed.
- Amid the many demands on a principal’s time and attention, instructional leadership can easily fall by the wayside.
- Bureaucratic entities are not shy about assigning busywork, which often gets passed on to teachers.
Hence, we built TeachBoost with a view toward removing these obstacles:
- By streamlining teacher observations and facilitating PLCs and peer intervisitations, TeachBoost helps administrators identify trends in teachers’ performance over time. Observations don’t have to be make-or-break.
- By aggregating the resulting data across a school or district, administrators can target PD and faculty meetings to address problem areas that are pertinent to everyone. Meetings can be focused on the most important matters.
- TeachBoost is adaptable to any state and district’s framework and rubric, so compliance measures are automated. Administrators need only to focus on helping teachers grow.
- A TeachBoost-enhanced observation process saves administrators an average of one-half a day each week, freeing administrators to fulfill their role as instructional leaders. Moreover, we partner with The Principal Center to offer the free Instructional Leadership Challenge to help administrators get into more classrooms and provide more rigorous feedback, without adding more work to their plate.
- Teachers use TeachBoost to set goals, respond to feedback, access framework-aligned PD resources, collaborate with peers, and build a portfolio of their growth… all without filling out a single piece of paper.
In other words, TeachBoost clears a path so that administrators and teachers can proceed unencumbered in improving their craft. Justin’s five requests are certainly worth honoring. We’re here to give you a little boost. 😉
