What is Instructional Leadership in Education?

Instructional leadership in education has been described in similar ways over time by various experts in the field. In a nutshell, it’s how an educator, typically in an administrative or specialist role, guides their colleagues to improve and refine their instructional strategies to better impact student learning.

It’s essential to recognize that teachers can certainly provide instructional leadership to their colleagues as well, for example, in a Professional Learning Community (PLC), but for the purposes of this article, the focus will be on the specific efforts that administrators and coaches can enact for effective instructional leadership.

Strategies for Effective Instructional Leadership in Education

Clear Vision

Strong leaders set a purposeful vision, based on evidence from the students and communities they serve. The vision should be central to the mission of the school and should have specific outcomes identified as goals. Simple language is helpful to ensure all constituents can easily understand and refer back to the vision, creating cohesion as the work unfolds over the school year.

Structures for Communication

The next step is ensuring there are leadership access points to your teachers that are expected, predetermined, and intentional. Having a combination of formal and informal opportunities to dig into instructional strategies and student data will support a comprehensive instructional leadership approach.

Creating a school year calendar that identifies specific professional development sessions, collaborative meetings like PLCs, and direct observation and evaluation sessions promote cohesive and consistent opportunities to advance instructional practice.

Targeted Feedback

Your feedback is one of the most high-leverage tools you’ll employ to provide instructional leadership. When observing a class, it’s important to collect objective information. This may include what questions the teacher asks, which students participate, what the task demands of the students, and the timestamps to monitor pacing of the lesson. Once the information is collected, what you do with it is what makes or breaks your instructional leadership.

Identifying celebrations and one to two specific areas of growth with suggestions for refinements will focus the teacher’s efforts. Be sure that the feedback you provide around growth is what you determine will make the most impact on student learning, even if there are additional things you may want to see changed. Keeping this focused lens for the receiver of your feedback will ensure change in practice is feasible because it is limited in scope and ideally tied to your clear vision and student outcomes.

Monitoring Progress Towards Outcomes

Feedback and support is only as good as the impact it has on students! Ensure that you have strategic plans to monitor student learning around the specific goals you have for your instructional leadership. What assessment tools, both formal and informal, will support your analysis of impact on student learning? Once you have identified these checkpoints, collecting and analyzing the data for trends is the next step.

As best you can, finding points of celebration within the data promote continued efforts from your teachers to employ your feedback in their practice. Areas of weakness in the data can also be motivating for teachers to evoke changes in practice. Set ambitious yet attainable goals for student learning at the start of the year, ensure your instructional leadership efforts are cohesive to that goal, and then be transparent with your staff about the data so that they can see the connection between changes in instructional practice and student outcomes.

Building Capacity and Shared Leadership

Do not discount the power of teacher voice! The highest form of instructional leadership is building that leadership capacity within your staff. Whether you explore instructional rounds, collegial coaching, or a core instructional leadership team that has classroom teachers directly included in the leadership planning process, these opportunities can create some of the most powerful motivation for teachers to consider changing instructional practices.

Additionally, ensure you have strong resources to provide staff as models for what you are encouraging them to try instructionally. Videos and texts are helpful, and the opportunity to see a colleague in action is ideal. Creating the context for staff to feel safe trying these new instructional strategies without penalty is a key strategic move in your efforts to build capacity with them.

The key ingredient: Relationships

Great coaching, with thoughtful feedback and structured opportunities for support and reflection, will make a positive impact on teaching and learning in your school, but you will unlock your teachers’ greatest potential if they authentically trust you. Taking the time to visit classrooms without the intention of observing and providing feedback, capitalizing on opportunities to celebrate even the smallest wins for a teacher, and also being empathetic to the human experience when a teacher may be going through something that is not making them as available to the demands of our profession, all help to ensure that your teachers see your feedback as supportive and not punitive. When your teachers believe that you see the good in them, they will be far more likely to make changes in their instructional practices based on your leadership and feedback.

Educators never stop learning; check out our available graduate degree programs to hone your skills and promote lifelong learning and academic excellence.

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What is an Instructional Leader?

Before discussing instructional leadership through coaching, it is important to understand what an instructional leader is. Instructional leaders make student learning a priority and provide the necessary resources to support teachers in their efforts to improve upon student learning. Instructional leaders are the driving force behind how content is delivered to students. Those that lead can be district leaders, school administrators, instructional coaches, mentors, and grade-level lead teachers. These leaders can implement instructional leadership professional development through coaching.

What Professional Development is Currently Available for Instructional Leaders?

While there are several resource options available to instructional leaders, professional development can provide a solid foundation for those that serve in instructional leadership roles. The Center for Educational Leadership stresses the importance of professional development designed to support the improvement of teaching and learning. Professional development suggested by and provided by the Center for Educational Leadership includes utilizing videos, lesson observations, classroom coaching in action, and the development of subject matter, collaboration, and instructional knowledge. District frameworks and grade-level expectations should be put into place so that instructional leaders can become fluent in teaching and learning expectations and relay this important information to teachers. The National Boards Association Center for Public Education Report states:

“The one-time workshop assumes the only challenge facing teachers is a lack of knowledge of effective teaching practices and when that knowledge gap is corrected, teachers will then be able to change. Research finds otherwise. It turns out teachers’ greatest challenge comes when they attempt to implement newly learned methods into the classroom. In all forms of learning a new skill, mere knowledge of it is never as difficult as its implementation….Crafting effective professional development means confronting this reality and building a significant amount of support for teachers during the critical implementation phase in one’s actual classroom.” 

In order to implement effective professional development that supports teachers, coaches can receive in-service training from district leaders, participate in professional development from an outside agency, or learn from other instructional coaches in their district through collaboration and observation.

Furthermore, districts can adopt effective coaching models, such as the “GROW Model”, which is a tool used to organize coaching and serves as a framework for short- and long-term teaching and learning goals. The model is often repeated during the school year and includes the following:

• Goals – Goals are set at planning meetings.
• Reality – Instructional teams follow district and state expectations along with student data to determine goals and develop ways to measure success.
• Options – Instructional teams set necessary steps toward meeting goals.
• Way forward/Will – The process for meeting goals begins. Teachers and leaders are accountable for following the steps developed by the instructional team.

Often times, instructional leaders are not taught effective coaching models and are told to lead without guidance as to how they should lead. If districts would make it a priority to teach coaches how to coach effectively, teaching and learning would flourish.

Additionally, leaders are often aware of instructional programs being used at their site; however, they may not have a deep understanding of how the programs work and how they are aligned with standards to promote student growth. In depth training for instructional leaders should be provided as much as possible to insure that proper support is provided to teachers at the school level. If leaders do not know what is going on in the world of education, in their districts, and in their schools, they cannot provide effective leadership to their buildings.

Why is Coaching an Effective Form of Professional Development for Instructional Leaders?

Just like students, teachers benefit from support and guidance. Coaching allows this guidance. When coaching is present, performance is more regularly examined and monitored. Coaches can recognize concerns and needs of teachers and identify what professional development is needed in order for students to be provided with high-quality learning experiences.

Instructional leaders can be coached in a variety of areas. Coaching can come in the form of modeling, providing feedback, collaboration, and using data to guide teachers through decision making. Instructional leaders can help build teacher capacity by helping teachers identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in their practice and providing them with resources and supports to improve upon weaknesses.

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