 I don't know why I think you might know. Is it on? Hello? Oh, it's on. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Happy, I think it's Wednesday. Thank you all for being here. For those in the back, there should be enough seats. So try to find your way in. And if folks can move around a little, it makes space. Or we can bring more chairs too. So thank you all very much for joining us today, for a great conversation. Hopefully some riveting questions from all of you in the end. For those of you who don't know, and I should say, there's folks on the phone too. Not sure how to make this go on. Click, click. You can follow along. If folks want to follow along with the hashtags there. I want to thank those of you that are here in the room, but also those of you that may be watching the live stream of this event. There are a couple of big conferences going on right now, principal conferences. So I know there's folks out there that can't be here in DC that may also be watching. It's a big topic right now. It's a big issue. And right now in the summers is a time in some respects that we're able to reflect and think about this work before a new school year begins. So when you do events like this, we always decide, oh, we should do this right back to school, right when school starts. But as it happens when school starts, it's a very, very busy time. So we're hoping that this is actually a nice time to be doing an event like this and having conversations about principles and leadership. And in general, just our public school system. So I'm going to start, for those of you who are not familiar with New America, if you don't already know us, welcome. We are a think tank and a civic enterprise that is based here in DC. But we actually have hub offices in cities around the country in New York, in San Francisco, Chicago, Indianapolis, and we're growing. Part of the reason we do that is because we want to understand what's happening nationally, but we also really need to understand what's happening locally. Because that's where actually things are happening. That's where change is going to occur. And that's where the most learning for us and for everybody is going to come from. So we have a number of programs. If you go to our website, you might be a little bit overwhelmed by them. Working here, I'm overwhelmed by them because we cover a whole lot of different issues from foreign policy and international security, resource security, open technology, cyber security, and more. Our education policy program is one of our biggest programs. We span from early ed, some folks in here from our program, from birth, the newest minds, all the way through higher education and workforce. And that's unique, I would say. There are not a lot of places that do the kind of work that we do and actually span in education from early ed all the way through. And it's a real strength of ours because it means we have expertise in all of those places and can make connections. We work very closely together. And we try to align our work and connect our work as much as possible. Within that, one of our subteams is our education quality team. We focus a lot on a lot of different issues around education quality or educator quality, I should say. The work is mostly inspired by two things. One, that we know that teachers matter a lot for schools. Schools are not going to run without teachers. Kids are not going to learn without teachers. Reform is not going to happen without teachers. I think that's something that we've learned a lot about in the last 10 years in particular. We also know, the second thing, that you're not going to have great teachers if you don't have great leaders. And so we've focused a lot of our work in the last year, in particular, around this issue of leadership, around the issue of principles and the role of principles in public schools in general, but also what the job is of principles. So we're gathered here today to try to discuss, in particular, two papers that we released in the last year, the first of which was called Frenzy to Focus. And we have some representatives of the districts that are featured in that. If you don't have copies of those reports, both Frenzy to Focus and the second one, which is guiding principles, they're located outside. We can give you more copies. Anyone online, you can find it on our website. The two reports, there's a lot in them. And guiding principles in particular, which is the more recent one, has a data visualization that goes with it on our website. So I encourage you to look at that. My colleagues, Melissa Tully and Roxanne Garza, who have been leading this work, are both going to be speaking with you and leading a panel and talking about our research in just a moment. But I want to, again, thank you for being here. I want to thank the Gates Foundation for their support, not just of this work, but the prior work that we've done on educator quality and the work that we plan to continue to do. We are expanding our educator quality work and trying to align it again with a lot of the other sub teams and the work that we're doing. We do a considerable amount of work on various sub-populations, in particular with English learners. We're trying to understand how you can grow pipelines into pathways, into education from the high school, all the way up through a pair of professionals and others in the community that might decide to come and work and help to improve and support our public schools. We don't know entirely what that looks like, but we're trying to understand that landscape. And we're going to continue to do that work. This work is central to that, because it's both, again, the national landscape trying to understand what's actually happening at the national level. Roxanne's going to speak now about what it looks like. This, all the states, if you look across our nation, what's happening when you look at instructional leadership for principals. As hard as a principal's job may be, and I can't pretend never, I've not been a principal, so I have no idea how difficult the job of a principal actually is other than reading about it, but increasingly now we're asking principals to be instructional leaders. So you're not just doing everything, but you're also making sure that your teachers are good teachers, and that's a very difficult job. It's easy for us to say, it's very difficult to do. So we want to dig into that now. My water. Roxanne's going to begin, and then we'll move to a panel. If you all have questions, please, if you could hold them to the end, and after Roxanne and after the panel, we'll take all those questions. So I hope that's clear. Thanks again for being here, and I'm going to hand it over to Roxanne Garza. Thank you, Elena, and thank you to all of you for joining us here today. As Elena mentioned, I'm going to briefly walk us through the findings from two of our recent reports, one on principal instructional leadership, and the other on innovative models for school leadership teams, and that we'll all set the stage for the panel that we'll go on after the presentation. Our guiding principals research had two objectives. So first, to examine whether states are incorporating instructional leadership into their principal evaluation systems, and if they are, how they're defining it. And second, to explore the role that states are playing in supporting the implementation of that instructional leadership aspect. So to meet our first objective, we collected and analyzed publicly available data from the principal practice portion of the state-designed or approved evaluation systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found that every state, with the exception of DC, has incorporated instructional leadership skills and behaviors as part of its principal evaluation system, but how they're labeling instructional leadership responsibilities varies. So to expand on that, here's a screenshot of our interactive data visualization that Elena mentioned. It's a website that we created to display several of our research findings. This map shows that our review of states principal evaluation systems found that roughly half, so 26 to be exact, have a explicitly labeled standard that is called instructional leadership. These are the green states on the map. We analyzed the components of the explicit instructional leadership standards and found that there were four core components included in those standards. So those four are primarily activities around supporting curriculum and instruction, supporting teachers, making evidence-based decisions, and building a culture of learning. The other half of states, 24, have a standard that is slightly different in name. So for example, several states had a standard that was called something like teaching and learning that really conveyed similar responsibilities or expectations. So what we did was we analyzed and compared the content of those standards to the content that was in the explicit standards and found that they really had the same four core components in them. So for the purpose of this research, we refer to these states as having implicit instructional leadership standards, and those are the blue states that you see on the map. We then wanted to know and have a better understanding of how states are supporting principles in these four areas. So we reviewed state education agency websites for this information. We also reached out to all SEAs via email with a set of questions centered around the state's role and how they were supporting implementation. We found that most states are supporting principles and or they're supervisors and they're doing so in three primary ways. So they might be providing training and resources to principals and their supervisors, organizing principal networks, leadership academies, mentoring and induction programs, or providing support at the local level. So as you'll see from the screenshot, nearly all states are providing a basic level of training and resources to support the implementation of evaluation systems. The color of the states differentiates whether they are providing support to just principals to help them implement teacher evaluation. These are the green states or to principals and their supervisors, the blue states on the map, to help them implement principal evaluation. So as you see, most states are providing these resources to both principals and their supervisors. Some states are going a bit further by organizing networks where principals and principal supervisors can come together for professional learning or to discuss problems of practice. Others are creating leadership academies so that cohorts of principals can continue to get ongoing professional learning or they might be providing induction and mentoring programs to new principals. Other states are adding more SEA staff or creating partnerships with other entities in order to provide individualized support at the school and local education agency level. The guiding principals paper highlights three states that are providing this kind of in-depth support. So there's a Minnesota, Missouri and Texas. These states stood out to us because they are focused on providing ongoing professional development to principals in order to build their leadership capacity, including growing their skills in developing and providing feedback to teachers. And these are more screenshots from our DataViz tool. So if you'll see here, if you wanna learn more about a particular state, you can go to the map and you can either hover over a state and it'll bring up a window like you'll see on the left that will have more information on how the state is supporting implementation. If you actually click on the state, you'll be taken to a state profile page that has more detail on the type of standard, whether it's explicit or implicit, the actual language of that standard and then how we coded that content into the four core components. So it's a positive development that some states are increasing efforts to support principals' instructional leadership responsibilities. However, principals are also still responsible for it and evaluated on many non-instructional tasks. So things like schedules, budgets, community and family relationships, student safety and discipline. This means also managing all of the individuals responsible for completing those tasks. So people like the secretaries, the counselors, the custodians and the nurses in the school. A 2016 Bain and Company study of 12 of the nation's largest school districts found that on average, a number of instructional and non-instructional staff members that a principal was directly responsible for was nearly 50. And in contrast, the Bain report highlights that managers of other highly skilled professionals such as accountants are also responsible for an average of five employees, which is much less than what they found for principals. And even managers of less skilled employees such as call center employees typically manage only about 15. Also different from leaders of other organizations is that public school principals are typically expected to serve not only as their school's CEO, but also other executive roles. So roles like the chief operating officer, the chief financial officer, or the chief talent officer, usually all of those roles. So this is in addition to the role that principals play as middle managers when they're doing things like leading or participating in teachers' professional learning communities or even entry-level employees. So when they're doing things like covering lunch duty. So not surprisingly, a 2012 MetLife survey found that 75% of principals believed that their role had become too complex. These realities, along with research pointing to the importance of principals as instructional leaders has led some schools and districts to rethink school leadership and structures and experiment with distributed leadership models. In distributed leadership staffing models, other staff within the building take on some of the typical responsibilities of the principal so the principal's roles can become more manageable. While distributed leadership models can take on a variety of forms, there are two primary current models and these are teacher leadership and expanded administration teams. So with teacher leadership positions, teacher leadership positions help relieve some of the principal's middle management responsibilities. So things like coaching individual teachers or leading professional development activities. The other model which is less common expands the school administration team beyond the principal and the assistant principal by creating new school leader roles. And these often focus on operations to help relieve the principal of some of their typical duties and enable them to focus more on instructional leadership. Our From Frenzy to Focus report examines several of these latter types of models. Specifically from Frenzy to Focus details the benefits and the challenges of expanded school administration team models in three public school districts serving high-need student populations because we know from research the principals in low-income schools are likely to experience more difficulties staying focused on instructional leadership due to additional needs that students and their teachers have. Each of these districts created a new staff role to make principals roles more manageable and help them focus on ensuring the teachers receive the support that is necessary to improve instruction. So just to give you a quick list of those roles, Council Bluffs Iowa adopted the National School Administration Manager role with the support from the state. Pittsburgh, Massachusetts created the Student Program Support Administrator role and DCPS created the Director of Strategy and Logistics. We conducted focus groups with principals and teachers in each district to understand their experience working in schools with these new school administrator roles. We also conducted interviews with district leaders to better understand their theories of action around creating additional leadership capacity to support principals in this particular way. Our research on state and district efforts to help principals have the time, knowledge and skills to focus on instructional leadership found clear benefits but also challenges to doing this work well. So to expand on that, I'd like to now invite our panelists to come up to the stage to share their efforts and their perspectives on what needs to be in place for principals and supervisors to not only think differently about the principals role but to also operate differently in general. So as Elena mentioned, if you have questions about everything I just talked about, please hold those till after the panel we'll have time for Q&A then but I'll briefly introduce our panelists. So on the far left, we have Melissa Thule, New America's Director of Pre-K-12 Educator Quality who will moderate the panel. Joining her, we have Jessica McLaughlin, Project Manager in the Office of Educator and Systems Support at the Texas Education Agency. Next we have Michael Cody, Principal Development and Evaluation Specialist at the Division of School Support at the Minnesota Department of Education. We also have Dr. Martha Bruckner, Executive Director at Metropolitan Omaha Educational Consortium at the University of Nebraska Omaha. She's the former superintendent at Council Bluffs Community School District. And finally we have Scott Thompson, Deputy Chief for Innovation and School Design at the District of Columbia Public Schools. Thank you. I'm excited to be here with all of these fabulous people to have this conversation today about what it takes for principals to be strong instructional school leaders. And as Roxanne explained, each of our panelists are here today because either their state or their district has done some work to really elevate and support principals as school leaders. So I'd like to just first start by having you all describe what that work was and your rationale behind taking that on. Let's start with Jessica. Good morning. I'm very glad to be with all of you today. I'm sure the work that we've been engaged in across the state of Texas. In terms of our concentrated statewide focus on instructional leadership in Texas, it really began with the implementation of our new teacher and principal evaluation systems. As our principals began to implement our new teacher evaluation system across the state, they saw the need for more consistent and ongoing coaching and supportive teachers. And as they began to be evaluated under our new principal evaluation system, they recognized that coaching was a core component of their role in terms of instructional leadership. But then they also recognized that in some cases they didn't necessarily have the tools in their toolbox to engage in that coaching effectively. And so we heard really demand from the field that we need some more concentrated training and focus around how to be effective instructional leaders in our school. And so when we were thinking about the approach that we would take across the state to instructional leadership, we didn't want to fall into the trap of focusing specifically on individual classrooms or even individual campuses. But knowing that the data says that when we implement strong instructional leadership practices, it yields to greater student achievement outcomes, we felt like this really need to be a systematic effort. And so that was where our focus really lied on the principal supervisor as the primary focus for our approach going forward in terms of instructional leadership. So we thought about developing our statewide approach. We really had two fundamental questions we were trying to answer. How do we hone our approach to ensure that our districts are implementing instructional leadership practices effectively? And then how do we spread those practices across the over 1200 school districts that we have in the state of Texas with fidelity? And so when we were thinking about that, we focused on the first question first and thought about how we could hone those practices. And we targeted in on trying to learn from some experts in the field. And so we partnered with three best in class third party training providers, new leaders teaching trust based out of Dallas and relay graduate school of education. The latter two of whom adhere pretty closely to the work of Paul Bamberg, St. Toyo, which we feel in Texas is a strong approach towards instructional leadership capacity building. And we partnered with those third party providers and set up cohorts of districts throughout the state partnering with our education service centers. And those third party providers worked with teams within districts. So the principal supervisor, the principals that the principal supervisor supported as well as vertical instructional leadership teams and focused on face to face professional development around core components of instructional leadership and most importantly, implementation support and one-on-one coaching of the principal supervisor. In addition, in our education service centers, we set up a role called the manager of instructional leadership that worked within the education service center itself helping to support the superintendents and principal supervisors, implement these instructional leadership processes effectively. Ultimately at the end of our, we just finished our first year of implementation and we've seen really strong success in those districts where the principal supervisor has been bought in and really supported the implementation of processes with fidelity. We've seen over 40 percentage points growth in some of our schools that have been implementing this process and even some of our schools that were labeled as improvement required under our current evaluation system have now been removed from those lists. As we go forward and we're thinking about the bigger challenge of spreading this statewide, we really fundamentally believe that our education service centers are going to be the primary drivers of building capacity of our districts throughout the state. So we actually pulled in our education service centers over the course of the past year and they engaged in that training process with us and we really stepped back at key intervals and asked, what were the lessons learned? How can we translate this to a state approach that can be meaningful to all 1200 districts across our state of Texas? And then our plan is for this upcoming year to define our Texas instructional leadership approach and really train ourselves up together on the core instructional leadership practices that we're going to then turn around in the year 1920 and implement across the state of Texas. So our goal is that by the, by 1920, we have a cohorts within each one of our education service centers who can then turn around and be the capacity builders of our districts throughout the state, hopefully spreading instructional leadership widely. Thank you. Yeah. Forgive me for use of notes, but as I've aged, so is my memory, but good morning and I'd like to thank New America for the opportunity to come and learn and to share with what we are doing. Minnesota is proud in its efforts to improve student achievement throughout the state. But a few years ago, we realized there was a gap in our support. In 2011, focusing on research about the significant impact that principals had on student learning, Minnesota legislature passed a law requiring yearly principal evaluation and focused it on instructional leadership. A stakeholder committee came together and created a set of principal standards that reflected the changing role of principals and then built an evaluation model that was piloted in 2012. In 2015, I was hired and was funding from a Bush grant and using that pilot study from that model program which was produced by FHI 360 and using the assistance of a group of stakeholders including supervisors, principals, professional association leaders, teachers, et cetera. MDE conceived and created a number of resources for principals, school leaders. To aid us in all these efforts, we enlisted a number of organizations from around the country, new leaders. We also used FHI 360 and American Institutes for Research along with REL Midwest. So we had a lot of good support, knowledgeable support for us. Some of the resources that were created is a change of leadership guide, an action guide for ILTs and PLCs, data tools and a stakeholder leadership survey. One of the issues we faced early on and we continue to deal with is a perception that our department of ed is there for compliance, that that's what we do, we wanna make sure that you're following the law and what we're trying to do by use of stakeholders and the resources we've created to show that we are there to support, not just watch over you. As we dug deeper into the needs of principal support and with the release of the 2015 model principal supervisor professional standards, MDE sought out and created resources for principal supervisors to guide their own instructional leaders. Our next step was to add direct support. Oh, and I forgot, sorry, but one of those things we created was a coaching guide for school principals in Minnesota. So it's pretty unique. It is just created in centers on supervisors. Our next step was to add direct support. So as time went on, we were able to do that to support school leaders and their supervisors, emphasizing the area of instructional leadership. Using the flexibility in Title II, we formed a principal leadership team. This exciting and competent team is composed of four former principals and our superintendents who are placed in our regional centers of excellence around the state. We have six regional centers around the state and these people serve all six of them but they're housed in four of those centers. The specialist responsibilities include mentoring, coaching, providing professional growth opportunities and establishing principal networks and superintendent networks for traditional and non-traditional schools. Looking on the research and looking at state standards, the team adopted seven leadership practices from which to focus, which have a high impact on student achievement. Principals and supervisors from around the state then were surveyed on these practices to see what they saw as a priority. The three that came out as a priority were developing a shared mission, leading through change and providing meaningful instructional feedback. An example of one of those programs that focus on instructional feedback is the Instructional Feedback Observation Protocol. We partnered with American Institutes for Research to train our team, our new team of supervisors, our new team of specialists to train supervisors around the state to provide feedback to their principals by viewing what kind of feedback the principals are actually giving to their teachers. And we found this as a powerful tool. One of the beauties of this system is our supervisors, the supervisors in the districts are actually providing the professional development on site. So it's a one-on-one system. While our program is relatively new, we are seeing some success. Traditional school leaders, charter leaders, and ALC people are requesting support. And so every day we get more and more calls for help within their systems. Individual coaching requests have been growing almost to the point where we've close to reaching capacity of our specialists. Feedback from conferences and sessions and especially the professional organizations that we go to and present at has been very positive. And website hits. Our website needs some redoing, a little hard to navigate right now, but all our resources are on that website. So Minnesota is taking very seriously its role in developing strong instructional leaders throughout the state. Thank you. My district perspective? My job was not quite as complicated because I only had to work in one school district and these folks had to work across a whole state. So I came after a fairly long career to become superintendent and come to both schools about a decade ago. And one of the first things that I learned was that our school had the lowest graduation in the state of Iowa. No fooling. And the second thing I learned is that a very prominent foundation in the city had just done a study of how we could improve the city and the number one problem in the city was the council of schools. Are you kidding me? So I said to that foundation, how are you gonna help? And they honest a guy said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. We are not here to help that, we did the study and our job is really to provide for the future generations, which made me think and why wouldn't that be education? So long story short, some colleagues and I came across some ways that we could help our schools succeed and one of them had to do with helping principals have more time to do the job that we wanted them to do. I had been a high school principal for eight years, assistant principal for six years. I knew the words that New America said frenzied is absolutely a descriptor of what the principalship was. So what can we do to help them? And we found a study that referred to school administrative managers, which were brought into schools at the time to absolutely take the management work off of the first plate of the principals and to coach the principal on a daily basis to spending time doing instruction, to spending time in the classroom, to spend time with teachers setting goals, spend time with teachers talking about what's going well and what's not going well, not from an evaluative perspective but from a how can we work together? That took money though. So I went back to that foundation and said, hey, what about if you would give us some money for this SAMS program? And with some convincing, they allowed us to bring in a SAM for our two middle schools, two high schools and three largest elementary schools. So then I went to those schools and was never ever ever gonna say you have to do this but it was okay, here's a new program. Would you like this in your school? Hell yes, we would like this in our school. So all of those schools accepted it and we found people and one of my colleagues said, this is gonna be a great training ground for principals to bring them in in the SAM role. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want these people to come in and learn to be managers. We want these people to take off of the principal's job, working with the parent association, being sure that the building is clean, being sure that the schedule is going, fixing the bells, finding somebody to do the issues and sitting with the principal and saying, your job is instructional leadership. I could talk about it for days but it worked. The data showed after the first year of working with a SAM, the percentage of time spent on instructional leadership and they measure it on a weekly basis, working with their SAM and then once a year, a trained data specialist comes in and quietly watches them depending on how many years you've been a principal of five days in a row, three days in a row or one day in a row and really talks about how do you spend your time and the impact on instructional leadership increased. I'll come back to it later. Melissa in New America, thanks for having me here. I'll have all of you know I took a long trip to be here. 14 blocks down, 14th Street on the 54 bus from where I live, North of U Street but I'm pleased I have a chance to share some of the work we've done in DCPS with you all. I've been at DCPS for almost the past 10 years, largely leading our teacher effectiveness work and what I'm gonna talk about today is our work around school operations leadership which doesn't sound like it's connected but as Elena previewed a bit, it's actually much more connected than you would think or than we had thought when we started this. I wanted to start off by just providing a little bit of the background in terms of our theory of action and what led us to thinking differently about school operations leadership. To start at sort of the first level and what's most important, we saw that our student achievement was increasing, we've made more progress than other urban districts on the NAPE over the past 10 years but still have massive achievement gaps and are still nowhere near where we need to be in terms of overall student achievement. Taking sort of one more step forward. We know teachers are the most important factors driving student achievements. Similarly, we had seen teacher effectiveness increase but we were also seeing a plateau. In terms of experience, we were seeing a plateau around the sort of three to five years of experience for most research success, the teacher's plateau. And when we looked at how teachers were doing at that plateau point, we saw still lots of our teachers performing at a highly effective level, especially on some of the most, the aspects of instruction that are most important in the common core world around rigor and differentiation and higher order thinking and these kinds of things. So that all suggested to us that our current approach to developing teachers wasn't working. We know teachers are the most important factor in schools. School leaders are the second most important according to the research and school leaders are also the primary lever for improving teacher practice. So we started to focus in on what can we do with school leaders. When we started this work 10 or 11 years ago, I think we had the approach that many places did at that point of, let's just bring in the superstar principles if we can find these sort of Superman principles and then empower them to do their jobs. They can take off and their schools will be amazing. And I think we recognized after a while that those people just don't exist and also they can't do that kind of work for 100 hours a week for 10 years for the length of time it takes to improve schools. So we began to think not just about hiring, recruiting great school leaders and teachers, but how do we make their jobs more sustainable? And consistently we found as new American others have found that principals told us their jobs weren't sustainable. It wasn't the sort of thing that they could do for years upon years. And so we were seeing a lot of principal turnover. So we tackled this in two ways. And I thought Roxanne's graphic with just the there are two ways to do this. One is about distributing instructional leadership. One is about non-instructional leadership. That sort of captures that things are all either instructional or non-instructional in schools. We tackled the instructional piece first through some work around teacher leadership by creating some new teacher leadership roles whereby teachers could spend part of their time teaching and part of their time leading teams, coaching their peers. We saw that as a way to both extend their reach so to enable teachers to be getting more feedback when it's not just from the principal but from fellow teacher leaders and also a way of retaining good teachers who wanted to take on a challenge, some new opportunity without leaving their work with kids. So that was the first thing we did. And then the second thing we did starting a couple of years ago was to restructure our approach to teacher professional learning in a more comprehensive way. We rolled out a program called LEAP that the frenzied report talks about. LEAP, which stands inexplicably for leading together to advance our practice. The tea is silent. A tip for any young aspiring policy makers out there is pick the acronym first and then figure out what it stands for. So the second way we did this was through the non-instructional leadership piece. And we did that through the program that's described in the reports, which we called our Strategic School Operations Program, morphed into school strategy and logistics. And the idea there was that we were going to tackle the non-instructional pieces of principal's work. When we surveyed principals, we heard from them that they were spending on average 48% of their time on non-instructional things. And that's everything from fixing the furnace when it's not working to dealing with procurement, ordering supplies, dealing with the technology, with buses and transportation, managing front office staff. Martha I'm sure could spend our next hour here just rattling off all of the random things principals do because there's nobody else in the building to do them and the buck stops there when you're the leader in a school. And we also saw that when we surveyed teachers, they weren't reporting that the operations were going very well. Our satisfaction results on operations weren't very high. I remember a trip to visit an uncommon school in New York City and the principal was walking us around and she walked us into the teacher's supply room, which was just lavish. I mean, there were working copiers, there were reams of paper in different colors. The paper was the right size, unlike the school in New York where I taught. And she said, when we were trying to recruit teachers from district schools, this is where they say, where do I sign? We walk them into this room and they're like, yes, this is where I want to work. And that's a shame, we shouldn't be losing teachers because we don't have working copiers or because the paper isn't in the right size. And we saw teacher retention was an issue too. As a district for the past five years, we've retained 92% of our highly effective teachers, 89% of our effective teachers. So we're retaining most of our teachers, but when we ask people who left, why they left, the top reason far and away is school leadership, as it is in any role you leave because you don't like your manager. In a second tier of reasons were things like operations and professional development. So we wanted to tackle those things. We also saw we were spending a lot of money on operations. It wasn't that we didn't have any staff members doing that work, it was just that they were in sort of a smorgasbord of roles for an office staff, custodians, administrative officers, business managers, registrars, counselors, all doing kind of overlapping things and nobody with a senior leadership role. So the principal might have 10 people doing this work, but when the air conditioning wasn't working, there's nobody to sort of seize control of it. So what we did was to create this new role called the director of school operations, or for a smaller school, a manager of school operations, we piloted it in nine schools. It was a more senior role, so you got paid more, but we also had a more rigorous selection process for who could be in that role and installed support for those people for the first time. And those people could actually supervise all of the other non-instructional staff in the building. So they were able to take, Roxanne mentioned on average, principals are supervising 50 people, they could take 10 of those people off of their plates. And the idea was to just enable the principal to focus on nothing but instructional issues in the building. Fantastic, thank you all. And I think you all talked a little bit about challenges that you faced as you were going through this work, but are there other things that came up that made it difficult to put these ideas and these systems in place that you were trying to use to promote principals' focus on instructional leadership? I feel like our states talked about those things a little bit. Were there other things that made it difficult to put those in place? I could speak to one other, and our early work was working with an evaluation program for principals, and the word evaluation is really a dirty word for many people, it has a certain connotation to it. And it took a while, and we continue to work on it, to get the idea that we're really pushing for growth-focused evaluation. It's a requirement for summative and formative evaluation, but the form of piece is what we're really working with. So with our new model that we produced, it really does work with the principal in a growth direction. I wanna talk about the fact that just bringing additional people into the building to help the principal isn't enough. You have to work with the principal then to know what to do with that extra time. And over the course of the decade that I was there, there were some other things that came along that were very, very helpful. First of all, our curriculum and instruction, teaching and learning team changed entirely the way that they provided professional development to the school leaders. They, first of all, wouldn't let the superintendent come. I was supposed to be doing the general administration meeting once a month, but they had the in-depth meeting where the honest-to-guys spent the whole time talking about teaching and learning and organizing it around themes and coming up with teams that would go out. Our director of secondary and our director of elementary got to the point that they were making visits either weekly or every other week, sitting down with the principal and talking about how's it going, what's going well. Three times a year they would do cluster visits which would allow other principals to walk through a building and look at specific things and talk about what are you doing, how would you approach it? Again, not from evaluation, not that it's a bad word, but not from the purpose of saying what the teacher's doing right or wrong, but from the purpose of saying what can you do to help this teacher improve. And then once or twice a year the assistant superintendent for teaching and learning would actually do a video conference with the principal usually that they would put up on the blog where anybody in the building could see the assistant superintendent working with the principal talking about what leadership and teachers and not individual teacher names or anything, but how are we supporting teachers and whether or not it's going well. So you can't just give more time, you need to raise the expectations and help people learn what to do with that added time. Scott, do you have others? Yeah, I'll just build on a couple of things. I think one of them is just the quality, the sort of individual performance and characteristics and skills of both the folks in the operations leadership roles and the DeMartha's point, the principals matters a lot and there's no role you can create in educational context that will succeed regardless of the characteristics of the people in that role. I mean, one of the things that makes education reform I think uniquely challenging is that it is an incredibly human based area of work. When we think about how education has changed or not changed for the past 100 years in contrast to the way we buy goods has changed completely versus 100 years ago. The way we educate people has changed only incrementally and it's because education is still fundamentally about interactions between teachers and students and these complex workplaces and so on. And so in the report, I think you guys did a nice job of highlighting how it's working well in some schools and other schools, the culture isn't right or what the operations leader is doing feels more compliancy or whatever it is. And I think that's what we've seen and that's to be expected. And then the other thing I would highlight is just that this approach to operations for us reflected a major organizational shift from thinking about these kinds of things in a reactive way to thinking about them in a proactive way. Our operations office had always thought of operations in a sort of firefighting mentality. We have people centrally who can be deployed when there's an air conditioning issue, when there's a shooting, when the subway's down, those sorts of situations, as opposed to how are we developing and building up internal capacity in schools to be able to handle these issues on their own? That's a lot of the reason why this pilot originated not in our operations shop, but in our sort of human capital teacher effectiveness shop and it created a lot of tension when you had this external, this different part of the organization saying we should approach your work in a different way. And I think those kinds of organizational bureaucratic dynamics are sometimes understated to think about the challenges in making these kinds of changes. Great. Can I mention one other? Please. One of our problems we face, even though some people think Minnesota's all farmland, it isn't. We have a few large urban districts, a lot of suburban districts, but a lot of rural districts also. In those rural districts, the superintendent is the soup, the principal, the bus driver. Lunch lady? Yeah, everything. And they have a very different situation than an urban district that has a larger district office or suburban one that can provide a lot of the things that they need. So it's a challenge to come up with and customize things for all these different types of districts around the state. So that continues to be one of our challenges also. It's interesting that you brought that up, Mike, because that was something that we had anticipated being a big challenge in our implementation of instructional leadership work, thinking about the demands specifically with our focus on principal supervisor role, knowing in our rural school districts, your principal supervisor is your superintendent and they have all those other demands on their time. So you're somewhat concerned around the ability of our rural districts to implement these instructional leadership practices. What we actually saw in our first year of implementation was basically the opposite was the case. Because the principal supervisor was the superintendent and they were in the room getting trained with their principals and the instructional leadership teams, there was sort of this common vision and common approach as they left the room on this is what our goal is going to be this year in terms of our instructional leadership approach. So because the principal supervisor was that superintendent, they could set that clear vision and kind of clear the decks for their folks to really focus in on what was important in terms of implementing instructional leadership. So we actually saw some of our biggest success from some of our rural school districts that really kind of had that like common purpose as they went forward. That's fascinating, yeah, because I think one of the things we found just even as we were doing some of our research was who the principal supervisors are really does vary and how many principals they are responsible for really varies based on the size of the district which oftentimes is related to sort of urban, suburban and rural characteristics of those districts. And so one thing we'd love you to talk a little bit is given the different job descriptions of who principal supervisors are. So in some cases they're the superintendent of the entire district. Some cases they're like a cluster superintendent like in DCPS's case that manages a subset of principals. And so how do you ensure that sort of regardless of what other roles a principal supervisor plays that they are up to the task of being able to provide coaching and feedback to help principals be instructional leaders, whether it's sort of through the formal principal evaluation system or more formatively, yeah, who wants to jump in, anyone? So from our perspective, we do fundamentally believe that the principal supervisor needs to be the lead instructional leader and needs to be a coach of those that they support. And so in our statewide instructional leadership approach, our principal supervisors are required to attend the trainings with their principals and their instructional leadership teams. And kind of as we think about the different models of principal supervisor support, ultimately we see them as accountable for teacher effectiveness and student outcomes even if that means that they might just be coaching through layers. But really their primary role is to be that coach of principals who are the coach of their leadership teams who are the coaches of teachers. So it's kind of that little bit of inception effect where we're really coaching through a bunch of layers. We're working to change some of the mindsets of number of who would be our principal supervisors, especially in the rural areas that this person who has all these other things to do as superintendent really needs to take a close look at the instructional piece. And I will say that where we get so many of our requests it is from the rural school because again they don't necessarily have the resources. So when we created our coaching guide and then especially with this instructional feedback observation program where we are helping turn the idea of what a principal supervisor, superintendent is in these districts into you can be providing this professional development and it's gonna be so much stronger professional development because you are right there as you said in the schools with your instructional leaders. I think we had the good fortune in Council Bluffs of being about a perfect size district at least. I thought so in that we had two high schools, two middle schools, 10 elementary schools and that's a really good size to be able to ensure that you're all kind of walking the same walk and talking the same talk. We absolutely work together to agree on what good teaching was and we based everything on data. We talked about looking at data. We haven't talked about that yet today but data really has to measure if you're making a difference. And so many of those conversations are around data and they're shared with each other and we talk about what's good and what's not as good. So part of it is size and I can't imagine how you do it in a school district the size of DC but I know you do. Sometimes I think for principal supervisors as for principals and assistant principals in all of these roles probably I think a first step is sort of communicating emphasizing that your role is here's the role it's different. I mean making the shift in conceiving of the role of a principal from sort of building manager to instructional leader is something that I think over the past couple of decades has been a major shift. Thinking of the instructional superintendents role as instructional leader or cluster superintendent as opposed to your job is sort of the backstop for parent complaints keeping track of your enrollment data all of these kinds of more operational things. So I think a first step is that but I also think it's important to recognize that's not sufficient and I think we recognized after quite a while that well all of our principals saw themselves as instructional leaders or would say okay I realize that I need to give teachers feedback I realize we need to look at data et cetera. The way they were doing it was totally different across 115 schools because we had just told them do this not here's how to do it. And I think an area where we've made some progress in both the instructional and the non-instructional side is not just saying go do this you figure it out on your own using Pinterest which is the top resource for teacher professional development most commonly used it is but rather like here's how to do this. So with LEAP for instance our program for professional learning we said to assistant principals coaches teacher leaders okay we're not gonna have you make this up we're gonna say here's how you organize your teams you will meet with them for 90 minutes a week you'll do a one-on-one observation hear your templates for doing that here are here's literally a curriculum for how you can run your weekly meetings it's not a script you can alter however you want to nobody's gonna come into your meeting and say you're not following this which is sort of the problem of scripted curricula a couple decades ago but like here's a starting point so you're not doing it on your own for non-instructional leadership roles similarly instead of saying to principals hey you're the instructional leader saying and here are roles that enable you to actually focus on instruction and we saw the percentage of time I mentioned that principals before the program were spending 48% of their time on instruction in the schools adopted the program that dropped to 19% in a budget neutral way we didn't give them more money we just said here's an opportunity and that was a lot of the reason that in a couple years we had gone from nine schools to 65 schools saying this is a thing I want to do because it was actually a structure that enabled them to achieve this vision that they'd internalized. I want to draw on something Scott you said earlier around principals come to the job with different skill sets and different preferences as do other members of their staff and so as you're thinking about principals as instructional leaders and thinking about how much time they should be spending on that and how they should be doing that how do you balance this idea of we have some clear standards of what principals should be doing this is what we think principals should be evaluated on and this idea of maybe there should be some flexibility around what principals are doing based on those skills and preferences and the skills and preferences of those in their school buildings do you think it depends on the school context like what are the different things you think about when you make that consideration around finding that equilibrium point between flexibility and prescription? Well I think in our context in the first year of our implementation I think we learned that one of our biggest lessons that we learned is that there are just some fundamental instructional leadership best practices that when they're implemented with fidelity yield student achievement and including data driven instruction consistent short cycle observation and feedback building a strong student culture with systematic routines and so I think when it comes to some of those best practices best practices are best practices and no matter the principal's preference there's certain kind of baseline systems that just need to be in place in campuses I think that that's where though we also need to consider that distributed leadership approach where someone on our campus might have greater strength in one area than another and that's where it's the principal and ultimately the principal supervisor's role to really think about matching talent to different areas but ultimately at the end of the day it might not necessarily be their preference but ultimately accountability the principal and the principal supervisor to ensure that those best practices are being implemented. I think that's a very refreshing perspective from the state of Texas to say I don't mean anything about Texas with that to say that best practices are best practices and we expect those to happen however there's a lot about how you run a building that's different from one principle to the other and that might be okay one of the things that I know you pointed out in the frenzied report had to do with the fact that in Council Bluffs when we implemented the SAMs we did not say that the SAMs had to do the same thing in every school we said to the principal and his or her SAM the expectation is you will the principal will be the instructional leader he or she will be in classrooms he and she will give feedback to teachers he or she will look at data and the school will be improving now how you use the SAM may differ from one school to another based on the principal preference et cetera and that was pointed out in your report is that not everybody gives that kind of flexibility but at the time we thought that's what was necessary. I think a lot of it is important to how the principal supervisor approaches things and in a growth focused system the principal supervisor is gonna sit down with the principal in that principal's unique setting take a look at what the goals are for school improvement principal set goals based on those and things that the principal really feels are things he wants or she wants to strengthen and from that they come up with a plan and the principal supervisor then helps that principal grow through coaching and through providing resources doing observations and giving feedback. And so as you're developing these tools for example at the state level to help principal supervisors evaluate principles like how are you sort of thinking about building in these abilities to sort of be yes this is a non-negotiable and yeah these are some areas where maybe it's okay if that's not the thing that you're directly focused on and maybe someone else in your building is how are you helping principal supervisors in particular think about being fair in evaluating principles that might be doing slightly different roles in their buildings. I think from our perspective so the whole focus of the next phase of our work is gonna be developing our statewide approach in which we're really focused on training and supporting our principal supervisors in training and supporting their principals and instructional leadership teams and implementing these best practices. So it's not just the expectation to say okay these are the expectations you go out and do it but let's work together to build our collective skills in these areas and so when at the end of the day we're coming in and evaluating there's not it's not a gotcha experience but we've really been working together collectively as a district and as a system to build up our practices in terms of the way we approach data driven instruction in terms of the way that we provide that short cycle feedback in terms of the way that we provide professional development across the district and so it's really thinking about how are we collectively building our capacity through implementation support and that one-on-one coaching cycles so that that evaluation at the end isn't a surprise but something that's sort of in a line with the entire vision of the school district. Sure, I guess I'm just thinking, sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna say a couple things about flexibility because I think it's a great point. From a district perspective, I think in implementing any program we've seen that there's going to be some, a lot of variability sort of from schools. Part of that is because there should be, tomorrow at this point schools are different leaders are different, the one, the same approach doesn't work for everyone and the other reason is just because people aren't machines and regardless of whether you want them to they will implement things differently. I think we've tried to tackle that in a couple of ways that I think are sort of maybe generalizable in designing policies. I think one is by trying to identify a comparably small number of things you really care about and will actually hold tight to and then having accountability and tracking systems to make sure they actually happen. So in the context of LEAP, our professional learning system we didn't just say to schools, hey, you need to organize your teachers into content-based teams, which was a shift. And you need to have a leader for each of those teams that is a content expert and for ELA, for math, et cetera. We didn't just say that, in February as we entered into our budgeting process made every one of our 115 schools submit a plan for how they would do it. We reviewed those plans in collaboration with their cluster superintendents. We gave feedback, we had to make changes if we needed to then we had them submit those plans and sort of finalize them then track those against the budget and made sure every school actually had a plan that was in compliance with sort of our program because you couldn't run a system of professional learning if you didn't have those structures. But it has to be a small number of things because if you say here are 30 things that we need you all to do, then none of those happen. And then I think the other point is sometimes as policy makers we set out sort of aspirations knowing that they're not quite going to be met but they'll push the needle in the right direction. So when we say, okay, every teacher needs to meet collaboratively with their team for 90 minutes and also get one-on-one feedback every week, things happen. It is hard to give feedback every week if you're an assistant principal. An issue happens, you may not do it every week. When we looked at the data, we saw 90% of teams were meeting every week. About 50% of teachers were getting feedback every week but 90% of teachers were getting feedback at least once every other week. That was a big improvement over what happened before even though we didn't hit the bar and we knew we weren't gonna hit it perfectly but by putting that out there, that expectation we sort of pushed the floor and the mean of the distribution in that sense upwards. So we're almost out of time so I'm gonna end with one last question and that is how important is it that the principal be the instructional leader for all teachers versus leading a team of other instructional leaders? So I know both Council Bluffs and DC have these sort of other teacher leadership pieces in place in addition to also having somebody focused on the sort of operations piece and taking that off of principals, roles and even still in those districts and in Fitchburg, which was the other district we studied in from frenzy to focus. Principles still felt like there was a lot on their plate and so I guess two questions. So how important is it that the principal be the instructional leader versus sort of distributing some of that piece also to other people in the building or are there other things that principals should be taking off their plate besides operations? One thing we heard a lot from principals in like our highest needs schools we're dealing with sort of like Maslow's hierarchy, right? Like we're doing basic needs first. So school safety, student, social, emotional issues and like some of the building repair stuff. Like if those things aren't in place, like nobody's learning so we need to fix those things first. So are there other things that we should be thinking about distributing off principals plates, whether it's more of the instructional piece, are there other elements? One of the things that happened in Iowa about seven years into this process was that Iowa legislature passed a law suggesting that they would give support to any school district that had 25% of its teachers in teacher leadership role. Kind of a nice thing from the state of Iowa to give that money for that but then all of a sudden in order to do it you had to really come up with new ways that you use teachers and we did that and I think we did it very well in a way that respected the knowledge and the skills and the experience of teachers. You don't need, the teacher doesn't need somebody else to tell them everything they need to know about teaching. They know much, they are the experts. So we had to find ways to use teacher leaders but I think Melissa you have a very, very important point. I don't think the principal can just kind of say, oh, great, now you lead in English and you lead in math and you lead in science and we'll meet every other month to talk about what's going on. When Jessica made the point about how important it was to have the superintendent in the rural schools be part of the leadership, what the principal spends time doing sends a message to everyone in the building and so when the principal doesn't make instructional leadership part of his or her job, the most important part of it, I think that's a message you don't want to be sending to your staff and students and parents. Other thoughts on that? I mean, I think another way in which we've shifted our perspective and have been pushed to do this with Common Core is just recognizing how much more expertise is required now for teachers to be as expert as they need to be in ELA and math and science and social use early childhood, how much more expert their leaders need to be and it just renders it impossible for the principal to be that expert in every single subject area they oversee even though that was sort of, we used to aspire to study of the principals, the best teacher in the building, the principal can walk into any classroom and model and so on and it just isn't possible and so instead I think we need to think about what's the level of expertise that a principal needs to have? For instance, if a principal can't come into a math classroom and recognize is this good practice, is it not, is it meeting the bar, can I make some commentary on this, can I engage in a conversation thoughtfully with my math coach or math teacher leader about this and am I fluent enough to do that? That's a different bar from I can walk in and teach you better, less than any math teacher in the building. So at this time we'd like to open up to the audience for questions and please just raise your hand and someone will bring a mic just to allow time for as many questions as possible. We ask that you please limit your preamble to your question to be as short as possible and really get to it. So you have a couple of questions over here. Thank you. Hello, question I have about is a place where it seems that operational leadership and instructional leadership really intersects which is on the development of the academic and master schedule within a school in a district. So I'd love to hear from you in terms of how, I know the school that I worked in, it was largely on the assistant principal and then some involvement from the principal, but those decisions about the balance of rosters, the staffing of schools, the grouping of students to hear from you as you're thinking about, you know, lifting some of the operational load, how you have been managing the development of master schedules as an important instructional and operational choice. The districts wanna talk about schedules. Excellent, insightful question because you are right. What you do in setting up your schedule is vital to how well your school operates. I'm not certain that we have specifically stated who does that, much of that work happens in the summer in preparation for the school. So therefore the principal is often the one that is there the most in the summer. So he or she is probably the one that's involved in that. However, there's conversations that happen at the end of the prior school year to talk about it. So I'm not sure I have the best answer. Hi, I have a question about what you all think about implications for principal preparation and selection given that you're trying to move the entire population in this direction. So in Texas we're actually currently in the process of redesigning our principal certification exam and the certification that our principals will be receiving is actually going to be called principal as an instructional leader. And so we kinda talk about our 25 year vision where we have our new principal certification exam. We also have a new grant process we've been engaged in to supplement stronger principal residency programs. So principal candidates can actually practice these skills before entering the principalship and then hopefully coupled with our statewide instructional leadership approach, we wanna look up in 25 years and hope that our principal supervisors and our superintendents are the folks who come through this principal preparation process. So our hope is to align kind of from the birth of a principal until they become ultimately a superintendent one day, that vision of instructional leadership. Our board of school administrators is somewhat separate from the rest of our department but they do have a collaborative group and that group in fact is looking at right now the competencies and revising the competencies based on what's been changing with administrators role. And they oversee the preparation programs and the criteria for those programs. And then they're evaluated on a regular cycle. Thank you, I was actually gonna ask that question so I can move on to another question. And it's two parts both around kind of buying participation from internal and external stakeholder groups. So is there an opt-in and if so, for additional professional development, if so is it different for traditional LEAs versus charter? And then secondly, how have the external partner groups like, if you wanna call them that, like a state superintendent association, has their role been helpful or hindrance in any way to implementation? Well, I can talk about the associations. It was key from the beginning to get the associations involved, our two principal associations and our superintendent organization and bringing them together. There was some skepticism to begin with, but once they found out what we're really doing, in fact, by the time we, and having them on the committees and helping as stakeholders, and by the time we produced some things, they were saying, whoa, this isn't what I thought it was going to be because they thought we're gonna come up with some new rules and regulations, but we were coming up with things that could really help. And now we continue to have a partnership, go to their conferences, present, work with them, and it is so key to getting what we need done in our state. So it's been a great collaboration. In terms of being able to opt in to support within Texas, it's certainly optional for folks to opt into the training and support that we've been providing. We do anticipate, we see our work intersecting and pretty closely with the work of our school improvement departments as well, knowing that the goal of school improvement is effective instruction. And so going forward, our focus and priority campuses, when they're looking to spend their school improvement funds, we're actually working to vet a list of capacity builders and third-party providers, as well as our education service centers that will be training, that they'll be required to use those funds towards building their capacity. So that's kind of like one way that we're sort of encouraging the participation, but it certainly is often. I'll just add a comment on sort of our thinking about buy-in and opt-in and flexibility. I think a flip side of what I mentioned earlier around identifying what you're holding fast to and what the requirements are and being really tight on those things is also being really intentional about creating flexibility. So for these directors of operations roles, we asked schools, first of all, it's a purely opt-in process. We haven't made anyone participate in it. And then secondly, we asked schools when they applied to participate to say, here's a whole sort of array of the types of non-instructional responsibilities you could have your director or manager of operations responsible for, what are the, how do you imagine creating the role? Like what would you like to have be the work streams? And so we have some schools where that person is the leader for family engagement and parent engagement, some schools where they're not. Sometimes they play a big role with special education compliance. They have that kind of flexibility to meet the needs of every individual circumstance, helps to get people, schools, individuals, and those roles more part into the program. Hi, the question about how this all plays out for two groups of schools. First of all, charter schools, maybe this is for the state people. Does this has any impact on the leadership quality of four kids who go to public charter schools? And the second group is low-performing schools. It's great to hear about what you're doing with priority and focus schools. But when it's an opt-in, we know that the stronger schools are more likely to opt-in for a new program and also be successful in it. So if you could speak, it would be even great if you could speak to a place where it didn't work, maybe Scott, your program, or it didn't work in a low-performing school, and why, what specific challenges the school had that it didn't make it work well. One of the things that we have going is our regional centers of excellence, as I said, there are six of them. And they are responsible for working with those schools, the priority schools and such. What has been nice with our new principal leadership team, they're titled to money. So they can work with those schools, but they can work with any of the schools. And we are doing a lot of work with charters. There is a real need and appetite in the part of charters to get some direction on instructional leadership. So, for example, this past year, we've been helping with a charter boot camp and bringing each month a different session to them as part of some of their training, like change leadership, for example. And in terms of some of the, like Scott, I'm pretty sure that when DC was looking at your new operations role, you were actually looking to some of the work in the charter sector to try to think differently about what school leadership teams look like. We actually highlight two different charter networks in our From Fresno to Focus paper. So, both that have these sort of innovative ways of thinking about school leadership and having deans of instruction and deans of student services, deans of culture, and sort of thinking about how to create, instead of just a principal and an assistant principal, and maybe a director of operations, like having sort of a more horizontal leadership structure. And so we talked about achievement first and on common schools in our paper as having these sort of more unique models. So it's kind of interesting that, like I think in some ways that thinking started there, but is like moving more to traditional public schools, but certainly not all charter schools have those models. And to the other part of your question, E.Tai, our programs are successful in all of our schools. More seriously, I would say that... I thought you were serious. No. I think the frenzied report does a nice job talking about enabling conditions. And I think for any of these programs, we've tried to be thoughtful about what are the enabling conditions that have to be in place for a program to work. So in thinking about professional learning, for instance, having a sort of tight focus on really collaborative professional learning doesn't tend to be the thing that happens in year one of a school turnaround because we tend to see principals needing to focus in year one on building out a strong leadership team, getting the right teachers on the bus, establishing basic systems, making sure student and staff culture is in a good place, all of these things before they're diving into conceptual approaches to teaching mathematics in Common Core. On the other hand, I think the operations leadership work is something that can happen earlier on. And we've often seen new principals coming into a turnaround situation and wanting to make sure they've identified they're bringing in a strong leadership team, and that includes somebody to lead the operations work because otherwise, the principal in year one in a school that is in crisis can spend a lot of their time on just sort of putting out the fires, making sure that those basic things are in place. And so I think that's a thing that might be earlier in the sort of sequence and require fewer sort of enabling conditions to be successful. You said in the teacher leadership realm that for principals working with a teacher leader in the English base, it doesn't work to just say, hey, you go do teacher leadership and come back to me in a month. So do you have any practical insights about how that works in terms of communication and also keeping it collaborative with the other frontline teachers, how you make any things that you saw, Scott, you may have some thoughts there too, or anybody. I hope I answer your question. In order to participate in this statewide program, we had to do a very, very careful plan about how we were gonna select the different teacher leaders and we had the flexibility of designing what teacher leaders, what they would do, where they would be, how they would work, and how we would select them. And so there was an awful lot of collaboration that went into the like much collaboration even from parent groups on how those teacher leader positions would be developed, how they would be selected. And then after that, it's a complicated way of having them meet together, having them meet in larger groups, et cetera, so that they're not all doing their own, they're not independent contractors in each of the school. So in a way, it gave the teaching and learning department much more personnel to work with, which is good, but it also gave them the responsibility of how do you work with that in such a way that it's organized and that you are working for the same outcome, so it's difficult and it kind of builds as it goes, I think. Yeah, what I would add is just that I think on both the instructional and the non-instructional side, creating this greater diversity of leadership roles, provides more opportunities for principals to serve as really thoughtful sort of cultivators of talent. Right, because it means there are more sort of intermediate steps between being full-time in the classroom and being fully out of the classroom. And it's been exciting to see, I mean, we've been doing this teacher leadership work for five or six years now, to see principals who are really thoughtful about identifying, okay, this person is ready to sort of take one step, maybe get one release period, do a little bit of coaching or leadership, and then they go on to become an instructional coach, an assistant principal, maybe at a different school, maybe a principal, fellow, et cetera. And on the non-instructional side too, I mean, it used to be the case that there were no opportunities for people who were really great business managers to sort of take on more leadership. And now we've found that by creating career paths, they're able to attract and retain more talent in schools. And some of that is talent from within the school system and some of it is from other sorts of areas of work. Bonnie, I worked with Houston Public Schools for many years and in fact 20 years ago we had school business managers in schools as an opportunity for schools, particularly large schools to address these things. I'm curious about how you identify these people and train them because we brought in a lot of people from business areas, but then train them on what does this look like in a school context or bring in school people and teach them what the business context might be. How are you approaching that in your district? We found that about a third of our directors and managers of operations come from sort of that school itself, often serving in business manager, other sort of administrative officer, other sorts of more junior administrative roles, or as teachers. About a third come from elsewhere in the district, central office staff, sometimes from other schools, and then a third come from outside of the district. So we've had people who have done operations for churches, for nonprofits, for media outlets, etc. And I think you're exactly right that each of those sets of people needs a different kind of support because if you're coming from doing operations work for the Washington Post, what you need is sort of background in the school context whereas if you've been a teacher, what you need is support on developing strong systems and doing the operations work. And I think we've done our best to provide sort of some trainings for them, but then also we have a structure where our centrally based operations specialists have shifted from sort of, as I described, being that reactive firefighting, they're the one who goes to the school when there's a gas leak, into more of a coaching role. Where their job explicitly is visiting the schools, doing walk-throughs together, giving them sort of individualized development as is necessary. As of most things, the effectiveness of that varies based on the people and operations specialists, but I think it's the right approach at least. I could give you a real quick background on our school administrative managers. We were blessed in the very first year to have two retired principals that wanted to come back, not from our district, they were retired from somewhere else, wanted to come back in to do the work of school administrative manager which the frenzied report points out we didn't pay them very much, thank you very much. We didn't, because we didn't necessarily want this to be the job that everybody really wanted, this is a helping role in a school, but to have a retired elementary principal come back and be an elementary Sam was like a gift from Scott, like because I'm picturing one specifically who didn't want to go home and think about it, he had little kids at home from a second marriage and he just, but he knew everything about being a principal, but he knew this new role. But we also have had from the other, as Scott pointed out, people that come in with no experience in education and they have many, many other skills, but we don't expect our school administrative managers to be instructional leaders, we don't, that's not their role, but I heard this summer that one of our Sam's right now is going to go back to school to become a teacher. Now that's kind of a really nice mix around of those roles supporting each other. So my question's for Jessica and Michael. In such large states, I love to hear that you are using or utilizing your regional centers, but I'm wondering, and I know sometimes it's kind of another dirty word to say monitor, but how do you monitor to make sure that the end users, school leaders are really getting what they needed when you're in such a big place and I'm a little bit more familiar with TA getting smaller and smaller and so wondering how do you just close the feedback loop to make sure school leaders are getting what they're getting? Great question. So we're kind of at the beginning of that process as we start to think about developing our statewide approach, then knowing that we have 20 regional service centers across the state of Texas, that our kind of our goal this year is to come together and kind of collaboratively train. So we have over 25 days of training that groups, individual groups from each one of our service centers are going to be coming together and we're going to be doing over 25 days of training, thinking about specific components of instructional leadership and thinking about them at the implementation at the principal level and the principal supervisor level. So we all leave this year feeling really confident in our ability to turn that around and then provide that capacity building support to our districts throughout the state. I think as we think through kind of that next phase in which we're actually providing that instructional leadership support to our districts, I think that's where we're going to be thinking through structures that allow for folks in our TEA team and folks within our regional service center teams to kind of be doing consistent coaching and monitoring support of ourselves. So we're consistently increasing our effectiveness as we provide that support out in the field but definitely something we're cognizant of knowing kind of the span of the approach that we're trying to engage in. In our, so we only have six regional centers and there is oversight definitely from our department but the regional centers have the advocates and the specialists who go in and tailor a program for those schools. And one of the first things they start with is building a strong instructional leadership team which seems to be so key for it and then they continue to work directly with those schools throughout the process. And for those perhaps on the other end of getting support from regional centers, are there things you think that would help in that process to keep things from kind of getting watered down as they go from the, you know, state's resources. I can't specifically talk about it related to the school administrative managers but in my new role, I'm in a new role with an educational collaborative of 12 districts and the regional centers are absolutely stepping up to help us because we see they will help us, will make us stronger and we will make them stronger and I think the more we can work together collaboratively, we're not two different entities asking different things the better we'll be. Thank you all for joining us and you know, please help yourself to copies of our reports on your way out and we look forward to seeing you back at New America in the future. Thank you. Thank you.