Sharpening our focus on instructional leadership

Emily Freitag
4 min readNov 9, 2023

This post is adapted from an email originally shared on October 27, 2023. If you would like to receive future emails, you can sign up here.

I started Instruction Partners because of a recurring set of experiences I had as Assistant Commissioner of Curriculum and Instruction in Tennessee. After I gave a talk or visited a school, a leader — a coach, or principal, or district head of instruction — would come up to me and say, “I have a question. I know I should probably know the answer to this, but…?”

The questions that followed would range from the specific to the global. “There are three different reading intervention programs we are using in my school. Do you know which is best?” Or, “My elementary team is at odds over how to teach multiplication, and I don’t really know how to help them. Do you know the best way?” Or, “Can you explain to me how we should be teaching writing?”

I was struck by not only the frequency but the emotional quality of the questions. I could tell the askers understood these decisions affect kids’ learning experiences and that they were desperate to make the best decisions they could. I could also tell that they felt a sense of shame that they did not know the answer. They were embarrassed to have to ask.

Those experiences — and many since — have made clear just how much imposter syndrome and insecurity many education leaders feel about their teaching and learning responsibilities.

Leaders come by that insecurity honestly. Frequent and emotional questions about how to lead teaching and learning are inevitable as long as we, as a sector, cannot clearly explain what leaders need to do to support teachers, let alone support and help them to do those things.

I paused these emails the last few months because I was finishing a capstone for a master’s degree. The project involved a literature review of instructional leadership research and policy proposals about what we can do to better support leaders. I defined instructional leaders to include principals, assistant principals, coaches, teacher leaders, system leaders, academic teams, and any teams that support schools. I read many studies and many frameworks, tools, and resources.

I learned, in brief, that, even though the term “instructional leader” has been widely used since the 70s, it is so undefined that even instructional leadership researchers avoid it. And yet, we do know a great deal about what leaders need to do to support instruction. We know about the importance of strong content and ways to support professional learning. We know a lot about how to teach reading and what actions drive continuous improvement. Like so many things in education, the research on instructional leadership across actors and actions is incoherent and siloed; the teacher leadership researchers don’t talk to the continuous improvement researchers. And, like so many things in education, there is a gap between research and practice; what is known about instructional leadership is rarely the focus of leader prep or ongoing support. The result is an education leadership workforce without consistent confidence or capability leading instruction.

This would be less of a problem if leaders were less important. But the impact of leaders on what happens in a school — on teachers, student learning, and student experience — can hardly be overstated. Education is human work. Changing outcomes so every student has the support they need requires changing interactions, and those interactions are highly sensitive to the expectations set and modeled by leaders and the ways those expectations come to life in daily interactions. Leadership teams — principals in particular — have unique power to support consistency. And, if they don’t, the range in teaching quality will always be incredibly wide.

Many things in education are hard, but improving instructional leaders’ clarity and confidence is something we, as an education community, can do. There are more than three million teachers in American education; there are fewer than 120,000 principals. It is possible to get clearer about instructional roles and responsibilities — or at least versions that can work. We can update leader support and training structures to make sure that every leader builds the capacity and confidence to lead instruction.

Over our last eight years at Instruction Partners, we have learned how important instructional leadership is to instructional improvement. As a result, we are sharpening our focus as an organization on strengthening instructional leadership. We will help leaders and leadership teams:

  1. Adopt and implement high-quality instructional materials
  2. Facilitate effective professional learning connected to content and materials
  3. Support data routines that help teachers understand and meet learning needs

We will help leaders do these three things in a way that connects to each other while supporting conditions for continuous improvement across all three. And, because it is not possible to support teaching without attending to what is being taught, we will support these practices in ways that reflect the specifics of each content discipline.

Systemic problems need systemic solutions. We can hardly change this on our own, but we will seek to do our part by not only partnering directly with schools and school systems but also by building the capacity of others that work with schools and school systems (especially regional service centers) and by working with states to think about how they can strengthen systems of support for instructional leaders. We have found, over and over, that leaders need partners, not programs. We will continue to be adaptive, meet partners where they are, and support them on their journey.

Last week, I asked a group of 50 school and system leaders, “On a scale of ‘1 — rarely’ to ’10 — all the time,’ how often do you face questions about teaching and learning you feel you don’t know how to answer?” No response was less than 7; the average response was 9. As I saw the answers roll in, my heart broke for each of the leaders trying their best to support their school communities and for the teachers and students relying on them.

Let’s change this.

--

--

Emily Freitag

Instruction Partners CEO, former AssistCommish for TDOE, library lover, Sunday afternoon chef and head of the Jan, Owen and Liam fan club.