Building Efficacy With Walk-Throughs

Open your email, and you’ll often see a promotion for a new tool or platform that promises to ease the workload associated with classroom walk-throughs. We believe that the creation and use of a walk-through tool is one responsibility that you must not abdicate. You can follow a simple process to develop and implement a walk-through tool that measures important instructional metrics, improves your ability to plan and deliver meaningful professional development (PD), and builds collective efficacy among your staff and achievement for your students.

Walk-throughs are a data collection point. Just as our teachers need good data to make decisions and adjust instruction, principals need quick-to-obtain and accurate data to help adjust coaching and the delivery of professional development. The five-step process below can transform your leadership practice, build collective efficacy, and meaningfully improve student achievement.

1. Determine the instructional strategies on which you will collect data. Involve staff in this step and have your leadership team (representative of all staff)select three or four high-leverage practices as the focus. In building collective efficacy, the strategies selected have less importance to your outcomes than picking a process that allows staff to commit to working together toward improvement.

2. Select indicators that demonstrate growth, or lack thereof, on each of the strategies set for measurement. Consider your aim to be developing efficacy for each teacher and collective efficacy for the whole staff. Look for quick “wins”; no long-term commitment is necessary. Pick at least one metric in which teachers will excel or improve to help them find value in walk-throughs and comfort with data collection.

3. Collect data—and lots of it. Aggregation of data across the school requires many observations of each teacher in a year.This step is something you can’t accomplish on your own, so involve others. Anyone familiar with your expectations can participate in measurement, including assistant principals, instructional coaches, special education teachers, paraeducators, counselors, district administrators, and classroom teachers. Each walk-through should take five to 10 minutes, so recording one or two per week shouldn’t be overly burdensome.

Make the collection cycle short—your intent is to be formative and move quickly to the next step. Target twice as many walk-throughs as you have instructional staff in each short (three-week) cycle to let teachers know they are reflected in the data.

4. Review the data and provide appropriate professional development. Share the results of a cycle with staff and discuss your progress toward collective goals. Front-load PD to reinforce learning and help teachers know the expectation and how to achieve it. Take your time—go slow to go fast. If walk-through data shows that teachers are ready to take the next bite of learning, go for it. But if it becomes clear that some refocusing is necessary, take the time to do that instead. The power of the process lies in the moments you can deliver data-driven PD when teachers are most ready to learn and implement their learning.

5. Celebrate the results and repeat. Education is hard work. Accepting the challenge to be a better professional today than you were yesterday is exciting when you see results but devastating when you don’t. Keep the focus on growth, expect hard work and progress, and make sure that your staff, students, superintendent, school board, parents, and the community know how proud you are of the accomplishments of your staff and your students.

As with most aspects of our work, there is no end to this process. Tweak your walk-throughs as needed to collect the correct data for a next step or leave them alone. Then, get back to the classrooms and watch your teachers implement the learning you were able to provide because you chose to make instruction your true focus.

This cycle will give you more time to provide PD for your staff. That PD will be understood and immediately applicable, and the process will help you be in classrooms with your teachers and students more often. Greatness awaits—get to work!

Chase Christensen is superintendent of Sheridan County School District No. 3 in Clearmont, Wyoming.

Joslyn Camino is an instructional coach with Sheridan County School District No. 3.