Ep #319: Leveraging District Walkthroughs

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 319. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck. 

Well, hello my empowered principals. Welcome to the podcast. Happy Tuesday. So happy to be here with you guys today. This podcast is just one of my favorite things to do for you all. I love that I’m giving you everything I’ve got for free because I want to help as many people as possible. 

This podcast is the testament to my commitment to your empowerment and really just to your betterment. For you to feel fulfilled and joyous and happy and successful and accomplished and all of the amazing things because you are all of those things. You are the embodiment of joy, the embodiment of success, the embodiment of accomplishment. 

You’re out there doing this work every single day, every single week, every single month of every single year. I want to honor you and validate you, and I want you to do the same for you. So this podcast is for you. It’s a gift from me to you. I can’t wait to work with you all one day in some capacity. 

Today, I’m going to talk about creating empowerment from district walkthroughs. So most district administrators, in many, many districts, conduct site walkthroughs. They will walk through your campus. They will walk through your classrooms. Some are very official and formal, and they have clipboards or computers. They’re documenting things, and they’re sitting down, and they’re discussing those observations and giving you feedback as the site leader for you to then process and then share with your staff. 

Some of those walkthroughs are very formal, but many of them tend to be district walkthroughs where they come over. They walk through. They make comments to you based on the observations they’re observing. Then they give you this feedback, and that’s it. It’s up to you to decipher the feedback, to do something with the feedback, to interpret the feedback, to fix the feedback, right? 

I want to break down this whole experience. Because here’s the experience that I am hearing from many of my clients. This is all across the country. So it doesn’t matter where you’re stationed, or what type of school. This is the general experience for site principals when it comes to district walkthroughs. 

So the district will either announce or not announce that they’re coming for a visit. Usually they announce it. You might not have a lot of time. When a walkthrough has been brought to your attention and you share that with your staff, there is a tension that occurs on campus. There is stress, worry, hustle. People are trying to get their classrooms cleaned up. They want it to look its best physically. They want to front load the students so students are on point that day. 

They want to make sure their lessons are on point, their anchor charts, their materials. They want to show the best of themselves. There’s a lot of worry and fear, and there might be a little resistance. Some people feel resistance to it. But here’s what happens around walkthroughs for most teachers, and we want to be mindful of this as the site leader. 

So the district will say we are just coming to check in, to make connections, to see students, to see all of the great practices happening on our campus. Yet why does everybody get so tense and why does everybody gets so either frustrated or worried? People freak out. They spend hours upon hours making sure they are going to look good during these walkthroughs. Why does that happen? 

Well, it’s because there’s what is said the intention is and then there’s how it feels. Those are two different things. What people say the intention is and how it feels are not in alignment. If the intention was to come through the school and help your teachers and support your teachers and encourage them and give them feedback that supports them and provides assistance for them. 

If that were the true intention, and the feedback aligned with that intention, then there would be alignment. Teachers would understand what to expect. District leaders would know what they’re looking for and what feedback to give. You would understand very clearly why they’re coming, the intention behind their coming, and then their actions and their words would align to that intention. 

What tends to happen is we say the intention is positive constructive feedback, helpful feedback, supportive feedback. We’re coming to see all the amazing things at your school. Then once they get there, there is a different energy. They’re coming into those classrooms with a critical lens, a critical eye, a judgmental energy. They might not say anything to the teacher or to students, but the teacher can feel the energy in that classroom. Whether that person’s coming in looking for success or looking for failure. 

So the reason most teachers don’t like walkthroughs is because they’ve had past experience multiple times with district leaders coming in and saying it’s going to be with a positive successful lens, but it’s really coming in with a failure, judgment criticism lens, looking for what’s wrong instead of looking for what’s right. 

So teachers are always worried. What are they going to find this time? What are they going to notice? How can I avoid the discomfort that comes with them criticizing me or finding fault or looking for what’s not working? Well, the problem with that is if somebody’s looking for what’s not working, guess what? They will find it. It’s called confirmation bias. 

If the district’s coming in and looking for what’s not working, they will find it. If district leaders are coming in with the lens of what is working, how proud are we to be leaders of this school? How amazing are these teachers? How amazing are these students? If they’re coming in with that lens, guess what? They’ll find it, you will find what you seek. 

Now, you probably know this as a site leader because you’re the one getting the feedback. You’re the one that’s receiving the mixed messages. You’re the one that’s filtering those. You are the one that sits down with them to hear their comments, or you walk through with them and you see the facial expressions or the eye rolls or the nonverbal cues or that whispering or the conversations. 

Or they sit down with you and tell you directly here’s what we saw. You really got to fix that teacher in room 23. What’s going on in room 16? I saw kids were not engaged in room five. Your collaboration in this certain grade level, they weren’t doing the PLC way. Whatever, right? You get feedback. 

But when they sit down, what tends to happen is they might give you oh, this was a great little thing we saw. The sandwich method, one nice thing, a bunch of negative, and then one nice thing at the end. Those two nice things do not balance all of the in between, which was criticism, judgment, criticism, judgment, stacked 10 miles high with too little twinkles at the beginning and end. You know that. I know that. They know that. 

So you know, as the site leader, you cannot wave a magic wand and control the district leaders. You can’t ask them to change their lens. I mean, I guess you could, but you can’t make them change their lens. They’re going to come in the way they come in. You could have conversations about this as a leadership team if you feel safe enough to do that. 

But for those of you who don’t feel safe enough to have that conversation, there’s a reason, and it’s a valid one. Your district leaders have positional authority, which means they have power. When we question people in power, there isn’t a balance. They have positional authority over you, and it can feel unsafe for you to bring up walkthroughs and asking them to look through the lens of what’s working and to be supportive. 

Now, it’s not to say that all we want is to hear the good things. We do want to hear, as site leaders, we want to hear. If there’s something that you’re not catching or you’re not in awareness of or you don’t know what’s going on and somebody shares that with you, you want to know that but from a place of support and from a place of help. But my experience as a coach and my experience as a school leader have been that’s not the case typically. 

Typically, they sit down and they talk about teachers or about students or about grade levels or about classroom management or about engagement or about how bad the lesson was or how people weren’t doing this X, Y, Z. They talk about what’s not working. They share that with you. They’ll dump it onto you. Then you’re left with trying to process all of this. 

I was working with a client today. We talked about how to turn and shift those district walkthroughs from almost like victim thinking where we are just succumb to that experience, where we just have to take it, into a more empowered way of thinking about them. This was the suggestion that I came up with for my client, and I want to share it with you.

When your district’s offering you feedback, if they offer it in written form, wonderful. It’s already written down for you. So you can do this exercise with whatever document they gave you. If they give it to you verbally, which they tend to do a mix of. Some districts will write it down, but there’s always verbal feedback. 

They might make the formal feedback a little more professional, but you know what I’m talking about where when they come onto campus and you can feel the criticism just waiting to come at you and the judgment or the negativity.

Now, when you think about why that’s happening, if you put your thoughts and feelings aside just for a second and look at why would a district leader come in with critical lenses? Well, one, they might be trying to be the version of themselves that really is looking for what’s the one next thing we really need to do to improve our practice. 

There are some people that are really looking to do that, but those people tend to find a way to say the next steps in a very loving, caring, supportive way. Because they’re doing it with the intention of actually truly helping, if they see a teacher struggling, it’s not to push them down and kick them while they’re down. It’s to maybe this might help them. Have you thought about this? Might this work? Have you tried this? Tell me more? 

From your perspective, what’s working and what’s not? Why do you think this has been a struggle? I noticed this. Did this feel true for you as well? Maybe I misread something. Maybe I misinterpreted my observation. But not all district leaders are thinking with that level of awareness. They’re not thinking through the lens of the teacher or the lens of that student or the fact that they’re in for one moment. The fact that they’re not in that classroom all day, every day. 

They’re not thinking like that. They’re in a moment. They’re taking observation, and then they’re interpreting it. They’re making it mean something about students, teachers, classroom, grade levels, you everybody, right? So we have to keep perspective as a school leader when your district leaders come on to campus. Yeah, they are doing a snapshot. A walkthrough is a moment in time. 

So here’s what I’d like to offer. If you have this experience where you get worked up and your teachers get worked up and everybody’s kind of in a tizzy waiting, anticipating this brunt of feedback because it always seems to be negative or judgmental or critical without feeling like the intention is to be positive and supportive and helpful. Here’s what you can do to turn it around.

I want you to write down. Take a pad of paper with you, or you can just type it up on your phone in your notes. Write down comments that they’re making, whatever you’re witnessing or observing in terms of non-verbal cues. You can write those down too. Write them all down and then take whatever written format, if they give that to you, take that as well. Then take some time to go through the list.

Ask yourself what about this feedback feels true for me? For me, as the leader of this school? What did they observe that I have also observed? What feels true? When you receive feedback, it can sting in two different kinds of ways. 

Number one, when somebody gives us feedback, and it stings, it might sting because it’s true, because you know that it’s true. It feels true. You’re like yeah, I see that too. You’re right. That is something I do want to work on. That might be a next step. 

The second way that feedback can sting is when it’s not true. I mean, it’s really wrong. It feels like a misinterpretation, a misunderstanding, or a miss accusation. When somebody gives you feedback and your brains like wait, what? No, that isn’t true at all. You feel the urge to defend yourself or explain it or try and justify or defend it in some way.

It can feel very stressful and very painful to receive feedback that feels true. You’re like yep, I’ve got to own that one, and the ownership feels kind of like a sting. But it can also be very painful to receive feedback that does not feel true to you. So I implore you to take back your empowerment when it comes to district walkthroughs. 

What feels true for you? In your opinion of the list, go through it all, which one feels true, which ones don’t feel true? You can ask yourself what else might be true about this? Yes, that might be true, and what else is true? For example, if you get some feedback that says teacher in room 27 needs to work on student engagement. I saw three kids in the back that weren’t paying attention. 

You’re thinking that class has 32 kids in it. That means 29 of them were engaged out of 32. If you look at what’s working 29 kids were on point, on task, listening, engaged. That teacher’s got a pretty good percentage of student engagement going on there. it’s just interesting to notice, three kids aren’t engaged, but 29 are engaged. We focus on the three. Then we make this assumption that teacher needs to work on student engagement. 

It’s not to say the teacher could have checked in with those three at some point, but maybe she did earlier or maybe she did afterwards. Again, a moment in time. You have to keep in mind what else you know. Your wisdom, your leadership, this is your school.

What else might be true about that teacher? What insights and knowledge and wisdom do you have about that classroom or that teacher or this group of kids? You might think that was a really good day. The fact that they were in the back doing something else, there might have been something else going on. What else might be true? Looking for what is working versus what’s not. 

So when you get the feedback, don’t just assume it on. Take it on as absolute truth, and now you got to go and fix all these problems that they’ve listed out. You want to practice self-discernment. You want to discern for yourself what do I believe is true? What else might be true? Then where is the balance in your school? There’s not an all or none school. There’s not a school where everything’s awful or everything’s perfect. There’s balance. There’s things that are working and things we’re working on. Those are the two options. That’s what creates balance. 

So you, as the site leader, can take these exercises and take the feedback, look through, create perspective, validate your own opinion. Then based on your opinion, ask yourself what do I think is the next best step? What do I believe? Yes, this feedback is accurate. I do want to address that. Or I hear that feedback, but that’s not my top priority. 

That was a moment in time. Maybe I want to check in with that teacher and see how they’re feeling. Maybe they were having an off day. But it doesn’t mean all or none. The teacher’s all good, all bad, needs engagement, needs no engagement. It might land somewhere in the middle. 

Think about that feedback as leverage. How can you leverage the feedback to come up with a plan for what’s working? What’s not? What are we going to do differently? So that then you can proactively frame the feedback back to your teachers and communicate this in a way that articulates and focuses on what’s working. 

If you get feedback that says three kids were off task here, four kids there, one kid here, you flip it to all of the kids that were on task. District came through, this is what they saw. 29 of your 32 kids were on task. 17 of the 18 kids were on task. That feels different. It’s the same data just flipped. You want to flip the data so that it’s looking through the lens of what’s working and asking your teachers is there any next steps that you want to work on and checking in with them based on this data. 

Especially if there’s data you’re like I do know that that is a work in progress for our school. If your teachers are in the know and you’re in the know, that’s something to bring up and talk about and problem solve through. But feeling shame or guilt or falsely accused or even rightly accused, feeling judged, feeling criticized, that crushes you. That crushes teachers, which ultimately crushes students. 

So instead of allowing the district to come in and give you feedback that’s focused on what’s not working, you can flip it into what is working, and celebrate that. Be in gratitude of what is working. You can change the energy of district walkthroughs just by flipping the thoughts, by looking to see what else is true, and focus on what is working and honoring that and celebrating that. 

So try that. Let me know how it goes. I would love to hear more about it in EPC. If you join EPC, you’re going to get coaching like this every single week. How amazing would that be? Have an amazing week you all beautiful people. I will talk to you next week. Take great care of yourselves. Bye. 

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