OVERVIEW OF LEADERSHIP

Spend a few minutes brainstorming what your typical day looks like. Write down the tasks you do under either instructional or managerial (see below for examples of each). Go through your day – from when you first get to school to when you leave. Look at your calendar and write down tasks that appear on the link below.  Tally each task as either Management or Instructional to gain a percentage of the time spent in each type of management style.  Repeat this exercise a couple times over the next few weeks to see if the percentage stays the same or changes.

Instructional Tasks

  • Schedule time for targeted, job-embedded professional development on non-content, research-based, key instructional practices to help teachers improve.
  • Meet with collaborative teams.
  • Ensure for teachers to work collaboratively and support each other.
  • Engage in classroom walk-throughs.

Managerial Tasks

  • Management of budgets.
  • Creation of a master building schedule.
  • Management of building personnel.
  • Management of building processes (lunch, bus, master schedules, etc.).
  • Manage student discipline.

What percentage of your day is instructional-focused and what section of your day is managerial-focused?

Word Use this handout to list out your instructional and managerial tasks.

What impacts achievement the most?

Dr. John Hattie conducted over 800 meta-analyses and classified his studies into six domains: Teacher, Teaching, School, Home, Student, and Curriculum.

He calculated an effect size for practices across these areas.  Practices that have an effect size of .40 or greater are where we should be spending the bulk of our time and effort, such as training instructional staff in how to use these practices.

Word Use this handout to check which high and low impact instructional practices are being used in your building.

It is important to be aware of practices with a low or negative effect size so those practices that are controllable can be monitored and to not include those you can control as part of your daily building instructional operation.  Precious instructional time spent on practices like this yield no positive results for students.

The following graphs compare the effect sizes recorded from all 3 of Hattie’s books (Hattie, 2009), (Hattie, 2012), (Hattie, 2015). The first graph shows factors that have the lowest and sometimes negative influence (or effect size) on achievement, while the second graph displays the influences with the highest effect sizes.

link Check out the all of the factors from Hattie’s books using this interactive graph.

Influences with the Highest Effect Sizes
Influences with the Lowest Effect Sizes

Based on these influences what type of practices would you spend your time implementing? What type of practices would you like for your staff to spend time implementing?

Practices with a high effect size should be deeply embedded throughout your building’s daily instructional operation.  These practices should be evident as you observe classrooms and structures within your building that support instructional effectiveness, including but not limited to, all staff:

  • participating in meaningful, effective collaborative team structures,
  • implementing highly effective teaching/learning practices,
  • using formative assessment measures to evaluate teacher practice and instruction, and
  • using this data to inform future teacher practice and instruction.

Do you know if the practices with the highest effect size are occurring in your building?

What is the knowledge level of staff concerning the effect size of various educational practices? How can understanding effect size be of benefit to the teachers in your building?

If the answer of any of these questions is no, what might you do to find out?